Crashing Castle
by Dillwg
Summary: An action based story outside of canon set late in Season 3 where Shaw is known to Team Bartowski but not part of the team. The premise of the story is how the team reacts to an attack on Castle.
1. Chapter 1

Crashing Castle

A/N After a couple of years of reading some of the excellent stories on this site, I decided to contribute one of my own. There was no beta, so any mistakes and/or credit are my own. Italics indicates the thoughts of the character. While this story is primarily about Chuck and Sarah, it is an action based story. Any constructive criticism is greatly appreciated. Updates are planned on being weekly. Any italics indicate the thoughts of the character. I do not own Chuck and/or NBC.

Chapter 1: Chuck versus Barbie Part One

Sarah Walker, accomplished CIA agent, glanced from the tandem kayaks over to the solo kayaks, trying to make her decision. Deciding that kayaking with Chuck would be far more enjoyable than kayaking beside him, she turned her back on the solo kayak to focus on the tandems. Making sure that Chuck didn't wander too far off, although he should be reasonably safe in a sporting goods store, Sarah fought back a grin as she watched him trying on life preservers in front of a mirror.

"Be honest with me," Chuck said as he slowly spun from side to side while looking over at Sarah through his eyelashes. "Does this color make my eyes pop?"

Sarah tapped into her skills at schooling her expression, knowing full well that he was trying to get a laugh out of her, and that doing so would only encourage him to try for more. Whenever he did manage to get a laugh out of her, Chuck would get this contented grin on his face. It was as though making her happy was the highlight of his day. This made Sarah want to give in and laugh more often, but conversely that would ruin the game, so she made sure to make Chuck earn every possible laugh. It made the ones that slipped out all the more special to him, and to her.

This time, however, her spy skills failed her as giggling broke through her defenses at the sight of a technically (in terms of age, not maturity) grown man standing in the middle of a high end outdoors retailer with his arms spread wide while wearing a bubblegum pink Princess Barbie lifejacket. Even for the infamous Ice Queen it was too much ridiculousness to keep her laughter bottled up.

"Well," she finally got out, "it is quite the fashion statement. Are you sure you can pull it off?"

"I could wear one as I am so fashion forward…And you could wear a matching one so you could be a life-sized Spy Barbie!"

A nearly subsonic growl caught Chuck's attention, and he looked around to make sure that Casey hadn't snuck up on them. Realizing that this time it had been Sarah to make that intimidating sound, he decided to ease up on the taunting of the elite assassin.

"Hmm, think I'll pass," Sarah responded, her voice colder than she intended. "I still can't believe that Beckman gave us the green light on a weekend rafting trip with Ellie and Devon," Sarah ended with a sigh that seemed to make its way all the way up her body from her toes.

"C'mon, we've been grinding away for weeks. Just 'cause she doesn't take a day off…or sleep for that matter, doesn't mean that we don't need to recharge the old batteries."

"Careful who you are calling old, Chuck. Just because we are in public doesn't mean that I'm not armed, and trained in over 200 ways to kill," Sarah responded with an arched eyebrow.

"God you are sexy and intimidating as hell. I'm just as impressed that you managed to sell her on us needing to go on a kayak excursion this weekend with Ellie and Awesome," Chuck said as admiration shone from his eyes.

"Well," Sarah replied with a glint in her eye, "it is our anniversary, so it was easy to convince Beckman that a real couple would be expected to do something special to celebrate."

As she had anticipated, the grin on Chuck's face disappeared and was replaced with his patented "Oh, crap" look, which then shifted to confusion.

"But, this weekend isn't our anniversary…er, fake anniversary," Chuck replied.

"It is too," Sarah replied, giving him that special smile that lit up her eyes. It was a smile that was reserved only for Chuck, as he was the only person capable of bringing it to her face. "It is the thirty month anniversary of the first time I spent the night at your place."

"Wait, Beckman fell for that? That doesn't sound like an anniversary she would accept as real."

 _Okay, Chuck doesn't need to know all of the details, like how I asked Beckman about Ellie's "insistence" that we celebrate such a nonsensical anniversary, pretending that (a) Ellie had ever made such a suggestion, and (b) that Beckman knew more about real world dating than I did. I was counting on the fact that the General had as little insight into civilian dating norms as I did. And after all, Ellie had given me the idea for the ploy when she told me the story about once tormenting Devon with a fictional anniversary just to keep him on his toes._

"Well, I may have gone easy on the details as far as exactly what anniversary it was, and heavier on the 'Ellie Bartowski would expect us to do something special for this anniversary so we need to sell the cover.' Speaking of selling the cover, if you were to show up wearing that abomination on the rafting trip, Devon might not think that you were taking his couples adventure excursion seriously."

While her spy skills might have failed her when it came to containing her laughter, she was sly enough to use her cell phone to capture a picture of Chuck mid-pose and text it to Ellie. Aside from looking forward to a surveillance free white water rafting trip with her "cover" boyfriend, Sarah was really looking forward to having time for regular girl-talk with Ellie. Before Chuck, and by extension Ellie, the only girl talk that Sarah experienced was with Carina- and that usually was not only one sided, but far more graphic than Sarah necessarily wanted to hear. Girl talk was another 'normal' activity that Sarah hadn't thought herself capable of prior to her time in Burbank. She was surprisingly pleased to find out not only was she capable of it, she truly enjoyed the one on one time with Ellie.

When she wasn't working her cover job, or on missions with Chuck and Casey, or on dates…cover dates with Chuck, Sarah often found herself relaxing with Ellie. Whether it was sipping mimosas with Sunday brunch, or a trip to the spa for massages, Sarah felt as though she could let down the barriers with Ellie and just be a regular person for brief periods of time.

Just like her brother, Eleanor Bartowski had the ability to slip past all of her mental defenses and make Sarah want to be friends with her. The only thing was, her time with Ellie had been feeling less and less like time with a good friend and more and more like time with family. Sarah worked hard on not dwelling on just how special it made her feel to be welcomed into the Bartowski clan.

The minivan had parked near the Underpants, Etc. store at 8:30 that morning. As one of the only vehicles in the lot at the Buy More Plaza, it stood out. The sole occupant of the minivan knew that the analysts at the DNI would twig to it right away, but that would be well after the fact. Besides, the windows were heavily tinted and the license plate had been stolen from another minivan of the same make, model, year and color. The plan was solid, so the driver was not too concerned with after the fact discoveries.

A Ring communications device sat on the center console. For this mission, he could only receive communications, not transmit. It was operational security, designed to protect his identity. Even though Ring communication were scrambled, the man was well aware of the operational capabilities of the CIA/NSA team covertly operating out of a base hidden far underground beneath the Orange Orange frozen yogurt shop. Never underestimate your opponent was a timeless lesson immortalized in Sun Tzu's Art of War. It was an apt saying for a man who was about to declare war on the CIA.

Right on schedule a minibus pulled into the Buy More Plaza at 9:40am. Although the paint scheme on the minibus was designed to replicate a senior center not far away, the minibus (like the minivan) had windows tinted far darker than normal. The other major difference between this minibus and the actual senior center minibus was that instead of elderly passengers, this minibus was transporting sixteen passengers in their late 20s or early 30s. Plus, they all had combat experience and were all armed- - heavily armed.

Out of the sixteen member assault team, fourteen were carrying H&K assault rifles, as well as personal sidearms and an assortment of flash bangs, and fragmentation grenades. One of these men also had a recoilless rifle strapped to his back, and his teammate had his pack loaded with 84mm projectiles for the portable artillery. The remaining two men also had personal sidearms, but instead of assault rifles and grenades, they carried Squad Automatic Weapons (SAWs) and 1000 rounds of ammunition apiece. These men were the team machine gunners, capable of sustained bursts while holding the SAWs to their shoulders, or longer automatic fire while lying prone. Between the weight of the weapons, the belt fed ammunition on drop leg pouches strapped to their thighs, and more ammunition in their packs, the SAW operators were the largest men on the team.

Only a handful of the assault team were "true believers" in the Ring. Most were mercenaries, who had smelled the smoke in warfare, often as special warfare operators, but who decided to go for the greater pay or preferred to operate with fewer rules, structure or oversight than was offered in the military. They were getting paid to blow things (usually people) up. They were pumped up for this assignment. They knew that they had been hand-picked from the pool of personnel available for this assignment, and they were going in with highly detailed information about the layout of the base as well as the background on the three people who could possibly be present- although the plan was to hit the facility when it was empty. There was also the incentive of a larger than usual bonus when the mission was successfully concluded.

Although the raid was timed to hit the facility when empty, the squad had been provided highly detailed dossiers on the opposition force that operated out of the base. It seemed odd that there were so few personnel for a base of the significance of this one, but the squad were also familiar with the government doing things in ways that made sense to no one-including the personnel making the decisions in the first place. Of the three members of the opposition force, one was a non-threat. The descriptions of the other two agents-John Casey and Sarah Walker,

while highly detailed, sounded like boogey men (or woman in the case of Walker) told to naive children. The squad decided that they would take any opposition force seriously, but didn't believe the hype being sold to them on these two super-agents.

John Casey was putting the finishing touches on his report to General Beckman, working to get the report off before starting his shift at the cover job at the Buy More. Although Team Intersect (he refused-even in his own mind- to call it Team Bartowski despite all of the good work the Nerd had done) had done more to protect his beloved USA than any of his previous assignments, he despised the cover job that he was forced to endure as well as the cretins that made up the BuyMorons. As he uploaded the latest report to the NSA secure server at Ft. Meade, Casey groaned as he saw that he had only a few minutes before his opening shift at the Buy More was due to start.

Not only had he been working since 5am for his NSA job, but he had eight hours of mindless cover work ahead in retail (which he despised) with Buy Morons (whom he despised), while dealing with customers (who were just a different breed of morons). Adding insult to injury was the knowledge that no one went shopping for appliances until the evening or weekend, so he wouldn't even be productive at his fake job. At least the bearded buffoon Grimes wasn't scheduled to start work until 2:30pm, which meant that with his work avoidance skills, he likely wouldn't be in until at least 3pm.

The other upside was that Walker and Bartowski were not scheduled to work as they were preparing for a "cover" weekend away with Ellie and Devon. While Awesome ( _damn that Bartowski!_ ) was annoyingly upbeat all of the time, he and Ellie Bartowski were proof that the sacrifices that people like Casey made of their personal lives were worth it. Ellie and Devon were smart, hard-working citizens who deserved to be able to live their lives in safety and security. Protecting them and other proud citizens like them was a duty that Casey took seriously. It was easier, however, to justify that self-sacrifice when thinking of the Ellies and Devons in the country, rather than the Patels and Barneses. Both sets of the parents of the latter had clearly been swimming in the shallow end of the gene pool when those miscreants were conceived-or hatched.

As for Walker, while she was by far the best partner he had ever teamed up with (which was saying something), Casey was well aware that the "cover relationship" was just a cover in itself. He also knew that she was deluding herself if she thought that she was hiding her feelings for the nerd. The two of them using the cover to tap dance around their feelings for each other was beyond annoying. He might have to lock them in a cell in Castle to force the issue someday soon. Then again, once they finally gave in, the lady feelings might be more than Casey could take. And that wasn't even factoring in how Walker would behave.

The three days they were to be gone was as good of a vacation as he could hope for, even though he was going to be working both his cover job and his NSA assignment the whole time. Walker was a little more discreet about her feelings towards Bartowski, but after two years of working together, he knew her well enough to know that she was thoroughly compromised. The thing was, with Walker that made her all the more zealous in protecting Chuck and thereby the Intersect. Despite never having worked with her in the past, Casey had been aware of her reputation and had read some of the reports on her missions prior to joining Team Intersect.

He had sacrificed a lot in his personal life in order to protect his nation, and didn't regret it…too much. But Walker was a good partner, a good agent and a good person- despite her issues with some of the tasks she had been called on to perform with the CIA. If she and Bartowski could keep their act together while still being efficient in the Team, it was none of the government's business if they mixed a little peanut butter and chocolate. Of course, he would still bust their chops, partly for fun but mainly to keep them from getting complacent.

The good news for Casey was that they were scheduled to be shopping most of the day and then would be gone with Ellie and Awesome for the entire weekend. Three days in a row to himself. He could hang out in Castle all day, smoking cigars, eating Hot Pockets and getting in some quality time at the range.

With Sarah being scheduled to be gone for three days, there was a sign on the front door of the OrangeOrange saying "Closed For Renovations". It didn't make much sense to Casey, given how recently the store had changed over from the old Weinerlicious, but it wasn't his call to make. As he had skipped breakfast in order to complete the report to Beckman on time, Casey decided to take advantage the absence of both his partner and any customers (usually teenage boys there to gawk at Walker before heading over to Buy More to drool over the latest mindless video game) and slip up to the OO and grab a little frozen yogurt to tide him over until his lunch break. A pastrami sandwich on rye at Lou's Deli was already calling his name, but lunch was still hours away.

He powered up the dispenser and loaded a container with his favorite, Mango Tango. Making sure to block the view of the surveillance cameras so that Bartowski wouldn't know Casey's dirty little secret, he reached over to the counter to load on some gummy bears (not exactly the makings of a square meal, but it would taste good). Grumbling that Walker hadn't restocked the spoon dispenser, Casey bent down to grab a box of spoons from the storage compartment under the front counter.


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: Welcome back. The positive reviews were greatly appreciated. As Ch. 2 is shorter than the first, I decided to post Ch. 2 and Ch. 3 together. The pace of action picks up considerably. I hope that you enjoy.

Chapter 2: Chuck versus the Gunfight at the OO Corral

The driver of the faux minibus spotted the imposing man in the green polo shirt when he had entered the stop from the freezer. The driver immediately notified the squad leader of the presence of John Casey, NSA agent and froyo thief.

"Sir," the driver called out to the Team Leader, "there is movement in the objective."

The Team Leader moved up to the front of the bus, peering through the windshield with binoculars even though they were yards from the target. "I don't see anything…wait, a second..."

Turning to the men assembled in the back of the bus, he continued "We've spotted John Casey inside the stop. We're going to move up the assault to take advantage of the opportunity to eliminate him. We will deploy as planned. Move out."

* * *

As the men poured out of the side and rear of the bus heading to their assigned assault positions with guns drawn, they didn't realize that their movement had been noted by the sole occupant of the yogurt shop. John Casey was never one to let down his guard, not even when poaching gummy bears at the break of dawn, and spotted the first of the gun-toting mercenaries to step out of the bus. The frozen yogurt cup in his hand dropped to the floor.

With one hand whipping out his phone to hit *99, the other hand reached over to the cash register to simultaneously hit the "price check" "print receipt" and "discount" buttons causing the smart glass windows and door to turn opaque. As soon as the phone call connected, he quickly spoke, "This is Colonel Casey. Authentication alpha, alpha 305. Crash Castle. Repeat Crash Castle. Code Zero." Peeking over the register, he saw the SAW operators lining up in front of the door. "LZ is going hot. Casey out." He quickly drew the omnipresent Sig Sauer P229 from the pancake holster at the back of his waist.

At the command input into the cash register, the smart windows to the stop activated, while reinforced steel rods barricaded the front and rear doors to the store. Automatically, an email alert went out to NSA headquarters. The technician on duty at NSA headquarters in Ft. Meade, Maryland checked the protocol set up for that particular substation and immediately notified General Beckman of the lockdown. Shortly after she received the alert from the technician, she was notified by the call center that John Casey had ordered that Castle be crashed. She started marshaling assets to make sure that the Intersect was protected, and that a fast action response team was immediately dispatched to Burbank.

* * *

Outside, the Team Leader spoke into his Ring communications device, "Movement spotted inside the objective. Engaging." Just as the "crash Castle" command was given inside the stop, the leader saw the change in the glass in the windows and door. "Damn, it. We've been made." Looking over at the SAW operators, he gave the command "Light it up."

The two men stepped from being the bushes they had been using for cover and opened fire on the front door to the shop. The glass quickly became a maze of spiderwebs as the bullet resistant smart glass absorbed round after round from the machine guns. The other mercenaries brought their weapons to bear, but with no greater success than the machine gunners had experienced. Instead of plexiglass shattering and the NSA agent getting cut down before knowing there was a threat anywhere in the vicinity, the door handled all of the incoming fire.

The Team Leader quickly realized his mistake, having forgotten from the briefing that intel suggested the shop was reinforced. The front door was damaged, but still in place. The problem was that not only did Casey and the NSA know that he was being attacked, but everyone in the shopping plaza couldn't help but hear the roar of the machine guns. As stealth was no longer an option, the Team Leader ordered the full squad to attack the building in force, but the rest of the windows proved as resilient as the shop front door.

Across the parking lot, the figure inside of the minivan had gone from confused when he heard the report of movement inside of the OO, to frustration when the report came through that the assault team was moving up their attack, to full rage at their incompetence as they uselessly alerted everyone in Southern California to their attack while not putting a dent in the bulletproof windows. He had cautioned during their briefing that a fortress was hidden under the facade of a yogurt shop. He let out a curse, railing at the fact that operational security was about to compromise operational effectiveness because he couldn't contact the team to take command.

When the mission had first been proposed, he had accepted the fact that he would only be able to monitor communications and not speak directly with the assault team. He realized that operational security dictated the lack of direct contact in order to protect his identity. But his temper was spiraling out of control as he watched his carefully laid plan get ruined by the incompetence of the men assigned to carry it out.

The man started cursing a blue streak while pounding the steering wheel in frustration. The fools had ignored his warnings that the building was reinforced. They had disregarded his caution over not taking on John Casey unless absolutely necessary. Instead of taking out Colonel Casey, the trigger happy squad leader had tipped their hand-as well as sending the few early bird shoppers in the Plaza screaming for cover.

* * *

With Castle on lockdown and the Code Zero issued, Casey had reached back into the storage compartment where he had gotten the spoons in the front counter of the shop, but this time reached up to a hidden panel at the top of the compartment. He quickly pulled out an M4 rifle with three spare clips and two hand-grenades. Casey then punched another command on the cash register, changing its screen to bring up feeds from the surveillance cameras covering the Buy More Plaza parking lot. He clicked to enlarge one feed right in time to see one of the enemy combatants loading a round into a recoilless rifle. His eyes going wide, Casey pushed down the momentary flash of jealousy at the sight of the portable artillery piece, and quickly ducked back down behind the counter to prepare for the assault to begin for real.

Moments later an explosion rocked the inside of the store, bending-but not breaking-the steel frame of the doorway. An electrical line crackled with energy as it dangled from the ceiling, swaying back and forth with a spray of sparks. Being careful not to touch the energized power line, Casey crawled out from behind the counter to make his way to the front windows. Looking through a small hole blasted into one of the windows, he saw the recoilless rifle shooter positioned near the front of the shop. He then noticed the shooter's teammate reaching into the bag nearby to grab another high explosive round.

* * *

In the blink of an eye, the rocket powered round had flown across the parking lot and detonated directly in the middle of the door. It had taken a moment for the smoke to clear before the recoilless rifle shooter could see that the first shot from his beloved weapon hadn't knocked down the front of the store, merely twisting the door and knocking a few small holes in the bulletproof windows. The mercenary stood in his spot for a moment, stunned that the yogurt shop was still standing. After getting a tap on the shoulder from his loader to let him know that another high explosive round was ready to shoot, the recoilless rifle operator went to take aim at the shop entrance door for a second time. He was still so surprised at the lack of results from the first shot that he failed to notice a piece of black metal protrude out of one of the holes in the glass window beside the door.

* * *

Casey had thanked his lucky stars that the blast had hit the reinforced front door, rather than the large picture windows on either side. He spotted the recoilless operator standing there looking like an idiot, Casey snapped off a quick three round burst from his rifle before dropping to the floor and rolling to the other side of the door where another small opening had been made in the bulletproof glass. He knew without having to look that his shots had ended one of the threats deployed against him.

Casey shifted his aim to the pack on the ground near the dead recoilless operator. He needed a miracle to detonate any of the rounds in the pack. Keeping the rifle set to three round bursts, Casey tried repeatedly to set off some of the remaining recoilless rounds without success. As he went to take aim more carefully, he thought to himself that he had been in one spot for too long.

* * *

The SAW operators had been surprised when the recoilless shooter dropped his weapon and collapsed to the ground dead from Casey's pinpoint shooting. One of them spotted the barrel of Casey's M4 poking out of the blast damaged window pane of the Orange Orange. The machine gunners sent a withering barrage of fire towards the small opening where Casey's rifle had briefly appeared, causing him to hit the deck. Every tenth round from each SAW was a tracer, which allowed the operators to accurately pound away at the small opening in the window. The problem was that while the tracer rounds showed where they were hitting, the shots also showed where they were coming from.

Ducking down to avoid any rounds that leaked through the blast hole in the, Casey waited for a lull in the shooting. Even with the limited visibility through the heavily damaged window, Casey was not only able to pinpoint the locations of the SAW operators, he noted that they were cocky. With new toys and superior numbers, they weren't bothering to move positions after firing a burst. A gunnery sergeant at boot camp had emphasized to Casey-or Alex Coburn as he was known before his life in the NSA began-that after you shoot, you need to scoot. It was a lesson that Alex had taken to heart, and a lesson that wound up saving Casey's life on more occasions than he could count.

Before the smoke from the machine guns had cleared, Casey jumped to his feet and fired bursts back down the line of fire that the tracers had lit. Casey taught the Ring shooters Gunny's the lesson the hard way. A gurgling scream told Casey that one of his kills hadn't been as clean as his shooting normally achieved. But the silence from the two machine guns let Casey know that he had two less threats to face.

Casey knew that the blast hole in the window would serve as a two way street. With all of the damage to the bulletproof windows, it was getting harder and harder to be able to see out. That meant that eventually one or more of the Ring troops would sneak up to Casey's improvised gun port and use it as a gun port of their own, or simply toss in a couple of the hand grenades that Casey was sure they were carrying.

* * *

Chapter 3: Chuck versus the Red Alert

Sarah was still working on stopping her smile at the sight of Chuck modeling his Princess Barbie life jacket when a noise reached her ears that made her smile disappear instantly and her blood run cold. She cut her eyes to Chuck who was looking like he was already starting to spiral into a full on freak out. Both looked to their phones, which had simultaneously started making the "red alert" sound effect from the original Star Trek series. While Sarah was familiar with the sound effect after several late night marathon sessions (usually as a result of a Night of Morgan), neither she nor Chuck had heard their phones make that sound ever since he programmed the alert- which would only be triggered in the event of an NSA emergency evacuation order.

Before Chuck could so much as blink, Sarah's trusty Smith & Wesson was in her right hand as she scanned the store for any sign of a threat. While Chuck's first thought was fear over whether Ellie and Awesome were ok, Sarah's only thought was that nothing was going to get through her to Chuck. Intersect or no, he was too important, too good, too special to allow anyone to harm him. Before the first note of the red alert had ended, Sarah Walker had disappeared. In her shoes stood the Ice Queen ready to eliminate anyone foolish enough to pose a threat to Chuck.

Chuck was now freaking out on several levels. First, from hearing the red alert evacuation signal. Second, over the fact that Sarah had drawn her service sidearm so fast he hadn't seen her move. And third, over the fact that Agent Walker was currently standing in the middle of a popular retail store with her gun drawn and a look on her face that promised agonizing pain for anyone who got in her way. The woman he loved had been replaced by Langston Graham's Enforcer. Although, the presence of the Enforcer was also a calming factor, as Chuck knew without a doubt that he was safe as long when she was in that mode.

Sarah snapped her phone to her ear while circling Chuck with gun in hand, causing shoppers around the couple to scatter for the exits. "Walker, in public."

"Agent Walker," General Beckman began. An emergency evacuation order was bad on multiple levels. Getting a call directly from the NSA director was so much worse. "We are dispatching a Coast Guard helicopter to your position. It should be on station in under three minutes. You and Mr. Bartowski ( _at least she wasn't referring to Chuck as "the Asset" for once_ ) will rendezvous with the SSN Key West. Make sure that no one learns the identity of the Asset. We will speak again once the two of you are onboard."

 _Damn her_ , Sarah thought to herself, _not only did she slip in a reference to Chuck as the Asset, but she hung up without giving any details as to the threat_. There wasn't any time to debate the many annoying habits of Diane Beckman. Sarah needed to get Chuck to the roof and then off of the grid, so they needed to move now and worry about Beckman later.

One of the reasons why she was the best of the best at the CIA was that Sarah automatically identified all ingress and egress points to any building or room upon entering it. Without having to think of where she was going, Sarah grabbed Chuck by the shoulder and started propelling him towards an employee only door that would give her access to the roof to meet up with the helicopter.

As a beautiful woman, she regularly attracted attention from men and women alike. As a beautiful woman holding a gun and pushing a man while looking extremely pissed off, she was now attracting a lot of unwanted attention. Despite the employees and shoppers diving for cover once Sarah had drawn her gun, a Loss Prevention employee from the store went to block their path to the door.

Seeing the gun start tracking toward the unarmed teenager, Chuck urgently whispered, "Sarah!" Sarah had limited time to get to the roof, and unlimited options as to how she could handle the situation with a Code Zero declared. But her time with Chuck had tempered her proclivity to use force to overcome any obstacle. She could easily get past the young man by pistol whipping him, or a spinning roundhouse kick to the jaw. And not long ago, that is exactly how she would have handled the situation.

Sarah quickly shook off the need to eliminate the barrier between Chuck and his exit to safety, instead reaching with her left hand into a hidden pocket in her brown leather jacket and drawing out a badge and ID, "Katie O'Connell, Secret Service. I've got orders to evacuate this VIP via your roof. You can assist us, or you can wake up tomorrow in the hospital, your call." She realized the guy was only trying to do the right thing, and probably wasn't making any more per hour than Chuck did in his job as the Nerd Herd Supervisor.

In the back of her mind, Sarah realized the ridiculousness of her ploy. She wasn't dressed in a g-man outfit with the requisite mirrored sunglasses and blatant ear piece, and Chuck was a casually dressed twenty-something who happened to be wearing a neon pink Barbie life jacket. But between the (real) gun, the (fake) ID, and the expression on her face that brooked no fool, the teenager spun and opened the door for them, calling out the access code for the roof hatch located at the top of a flight of stairs.


	3. Chapter 3

A/N Welcome back, and thank you to all those who have reviewed the story. This chapter is rather short, but the next chapter was too long to combine the two like I did in the last posting. I'm tempted to post the chapters a lot faster in order to avoid the temptation to tinker with the story and accidentally cause a major revision to happen...but it's a little too late for that. Barring any major rewrites, this should shake out at 14 chapters with an epilogue.

Chapter 4: Chuck versus the Helicopter

The wheels on the Coast Guard helicopter hadn't even made contact with the roof of the store when Sarah propelled Chuck through the downwash and into the open door of the chopper. A crew member quickly helped him aboard, not commenting on the bizarre fashion accessory that Chuck had forgotten to take off in the heat of the moment. Sarah leapt aboard without assistance, and with gun still in hand. Spinning inside the helicopter, she pointed to the pilot and gestured for her to get the helicopter back up in the air. The pilot had a couple tours under her belt performing combat search and rescue ops. She recognized the vibe emanating from Sarah that things were going to be done her way, there was no "highway" option. The pilot had little doubt that if she didn't move fast enough the spook with the gun would dump her out of the aircraft and take the stick herself.

Sarah glanced at Chuck's face and was somewhat relieved to see the stunned expression there. She knew that it was only a matter of time before that incredible mind of his put together the clues and realized that the situation must be truly dire. Not only had the NSA Director issued an emergency evacuation order for the most important intelligence asset the United States has, but she hadn't used CIA or NSA resources to carry out the evacuation. By calling in assets from the Coast Guard and Navy, Beckman had pretty much guaranteed that questions would be asked. Those questions could lead to the exposure of Team Bartowski, and that was a risk that General Beckman took extremely seriously. The magnitude of the threat must be sufficiently high to outweigh that risk.

Meanwhile the crew chief was shaking his head over what had turned into a far more exciting afternoon than he had been expecting. While they occasionally got the call for a rapid response evacuation from a vessel in trouble at sea, this was the first time they had deployed on land-and their flight plan was instantly cleared through one of the busiest airspaces in the country. They must have broken 20 regulations already on this flight, but their base commander was in their ear urging them to move faster.

The pilot called in that the package had been secured, and was given the coordinates on where to drop the mystery couple. Glancing at the flight chart in the thigh pocket of her flight suit, the pilot requested a verification of the coordinates even as she hurtled the helicopter at is max cruising speed toward the destination- a random spot in the ocean three miles offshore. The base commander himself verified the location, and then told the pilot that she was to forget anything she should see when she got there, as well as anyone she had seen on the helicopter.

With all aircraft diverted out of their way, the direct path to the coordinates took just minutes. Just as the pilot was starting to think to herself, _what the hell do we do now? We're here even though 'here' is nowhere_ , she looked down at the wave crests directly ahead of the helicopter and saw the feathering wake of a periscope break through the surface of the ocean as a submarine emerged from the depths of the seas.

"Strap them in, Chief" she called the to the crew chief who was looking over her shoulder, eyes popping out at the realization of where their passengers were headed. The Dauphin was equipped with a winch that could easily support the weight of either of their passengers, although normally it was used to haul people up from the water, not down towards it.

Yelling over the sound of the motor directly above their heads, the crew chief instructed Chuck and Sarah that they should put on harnesses and he would attach the winch to them and lower them down. Sarah simply nodded once, but Chuck looked from one side of the helicopter to the other, seeing nothing but open water. Realizing that Chuck didn't know where he was headed, the crew chief leaned out of the open door and pointed straight down. Chuck peeked his head over the edge and looked down at the Navy attack sub rolling in the swells twenty feet beneath the helicopter. He quickly snapped his head back inside, looking rather green from the experience.

"This is just like 'Hunt for Red October'," he called to Sarah who merely rolled her eyes while grabbing the harness at his waist and latching the winch line to Chuck. She already had her harness on as well. When the crew chief pointed to her and signaled that she would follow next, she simply shook her head, grabbed a heavy line from a nearby storage compartment, connected one end to a u-joint welded to the floor and tossed the other end out of the far door.

As Chuck was slowly wound down towards the sub conning tower, Sarah hurtled out of the helicopter in a classic fast rope deployment, snapping the line to a stop a few feet above the tower. The two officers on the conning tower were stunned at the maneuver out of the helicopter, and then more stunned when the daredevil turned out to be a woman with supermodel looks. Sarah punched the heavy line free from her harness and dropped, cat-like, onto the rolling deck. Given the limited space on top of the conning tower and the six foot rollers that the sub was pushing through on the surface, it was a truly spectacular move.

Sarah grabbed the grappling hook from one of the sub officers, only trusting herself to bring Chuck safely aboard the submarine. She had to give the helo driver credit, she was not only keeping station directly above the submarine, she was doing her best to match the ocean swells to make the transition as seamless as possible. On her first attempt, Sarah hooked Chuck and pulled him into a tight embrace. She then unhooked the winch line, tugged it and gave a thumbs up to the crew chief who started reeling in the winch line as the helicopter veered back toward the Coast Guard station, where they would write up reports that they did not have the security clearances to read.

Fortunately for Chuck, he had left the Barbie lifejacket behind on the Coast Guard helicopter, as he and Sarah were greeted by a somewhat dumbfounded, but no-nonsense Executive Officer. "Welcome aboard the Key West. We are currently en-route to San Diego. It will be a little crowded as we already have some guests below."

Sarah gave the man a hard look that made him uneasy even though he had several inches and about thirty pounds on Sarah, "We were never here. This never happened."

Chuck gave Sarah a look of joy that confused her, but more confusing to her was the response of the XO, "Neither are the guys down below that we are giving a lift to."

Sarah walked over to the open hatch and dropped down inside the conning tower, her hands and feet sliding down the sides of the ladder like an old sea dog. Chuck tried to scramble down after her, but had trouble trying to go down as the conning tower swung from side to side in the choppy seas. When he finally made it to the deck, he spun to face Sarah, smacking his forehead on a bulkhead positioned for people shorter than his 6'3" frame.

"Are you okay?" Sarah instantly asked, her hand shooting to his forehead to check for any sign of injury.

"I think my ego is more bruised than my noggin," Chuck replied with a rueful smile.

"Well, you are a bit taller than the average submariner," Sarah responded with a slight smile.

A nearby clang signaled that the XO had come down from the conning tower after Chuck and dogged the hatch shut behind him.

"Straight board signals green," called out a young seaman seated in front of a computer monitor covered with information on the status of the sub.

As soon as the word green started to come out of the sailor's mouth, the Captain was ordering, "Down planes. Make your depth one five zero feet. Resume course 171 and make your speed 24 knots." Making his way out of the conning tower, the Captain glanced back at Chuck and Sarah, "Folks, if you will follow me to comms, I've got orders to put you in touch with your boss." Raising his voice as he started heading off of the bridge, he called out, "XO has the conn."

Chuck heard "XO has the conn, aye. Sonar check for any activity on all passive systems" as he followed the Captain and Sarah to a nearby room not much bigger than Sarah's closet at Maison 23.

Knocking on the door, the Captain opened the door and ordered his comms specialist to give them some space.

"A helicopter ride to an attack sub? All we need know is some Russian speaking with a Scottish accent," Chuck said with a grin. Turning to Sarah, he continued, "Would that make you Jackie or Jacqueline Ryan?"

"If you are finished," countered the serious sub skipper, "I've got orders to put you spooks in touch with Fort Meade ASAP."


	4. Chapter 4

A/N: Welcome back to the story. Thank you again to those who have reviewed, your encouragement is truly appreciated. As before, any sections in italics represent the thoughts of the character.

Chapter 5: Chuck versus the Piranha

Casey had seen the second shot from the recoilless rifle, again dodging behind the counter. He didn't know who the new shooter was, but the new guy evidently hadn't learned the lesson from his dead teammate. The second shot slammed into the reinforced front door, mangling the steel beams, but being just as ineffective as the first shot had been at breaching the shop.

While the kevlar reinforced counter would provide some level of protection, Casey was forced to accept the fact that his position inside the yogurt shop was no longer defensible. It was time to follow the mantra of Gunny from so many years before. One last time Casey pointed the barrel of his M4 out of the window, this time draining the clip on full automatic in a "spray and pray" maneuver that he normally would frown on. This time, there was method to the madness, as he carried out the shoot and scoot move, pinning down the outside enemy forces before slipping back toward the OO freezers to set up a new defensive position, this time deep inside the heavily armed fortress known as Castle. He could hold off a siege indefinitely from the sanctuary of his underground base. He would be damned if he let any Ring agent make it past the doorway into Castle while Casey was still breathing.

Running at a crouch, Casey got to the OO freezer and was just closing the door behind him as the more and more rounds from the Ring mercenaries found their way into the shop's interior. As Casey initiated the retinal scanner, a grin formed thinking about showing these Ring pukes his collection of "toys" down in Castle's armory. He was looking forward to giving Betty, his M134 mini-gun, some combat experience. Despite his repeated requests, Beckman had never authorized him to use Betty on any of the Intersect missions. If the Ring troops managed to access Castle's inner door, he would have quite the welcome waiting for them inside.

Making a mental note to thank Bartowski for streamlining the code on the retinal scanner to speed up access to the freezer door, Casey entered a manual override on the main door from inside Castle, then hustled to the armory to get supplies for a little area denial when the knuckleheads outside tried to get into his base. He knew the Ring would soon breach Castle's perimeter, but they would be in for a shock when they tried to get into Castle's keep. Betty was downstairs, and the gatling gun that was begging for a little action.

Inside Castle, Casey quickly set to work on creating a layered defense, his own version of area denial. He set up trip wires linked to claymore mines on the stairwell, positioned so that the wire wouldn't be tripped until the Ring point man was well down the stairs. The anti-personnel mines, however, were positioned up and down the stairwell and were daisy-chained so that any Ring troops following behind the point man would be caught up in the blasts.

He next overturned the large conference table, setting up Betty with her five barrels trained on the door leading to the OO freezer. Casey lugged box after box of belt fed ammo from the armory to be positioned next to Betty once the action started. Casey strapped on a backpack, filling the pouches with clips for the M4 rifle, and attaching hand grenades to every available hook. He strapped on thigh holsters for his beloved Sig Sauer P226 and his Desert Eagle .50 caliber handgun.

Moving over to his computer console, Casey tried to bring up the outside surveillance cameras, only to find that the feeds were all disabled. Given the number of cameras, and the fact that he had hidden them himself, Casey was now sure that there was an inside source for the Ring. It was time for him to update Beckman.

"General," Casey reported in over his cell phone as the external feed was just as dead as the surveillance cameras. "I've got a hostile force assaulting Castle. There are at least 12 in the opposition force, possibly more. I've put down three so far, possibly four, but had to fall back from the OO storefront. They managed to penetrate the bulletproof glass with a recoilless rifle. I have taken up a defensive position in Castle. The power lines are down, but the backup battery systems are functioning. I should be able to hold them off for four, maybe five days. I've got mines on the stairwell, an M134 with 2,500 rounds, as well as the usual suspects from Castle's armory. I've also got several dozen Hot Pockets, so rations are secured."

"Ma'am, they've cut the feed to the surveillance cameras, as well as disabled the computer data lines. All indications on this end are at least inside information if not a fully inside job. But I can assure you ma'am, they will not take Castle. If necessary, I'll set scuttling charges throughout the base to ensure that no hostiles can lay their dirty, stinking hands on our mech."

"Colonel, we've been monitoring Ring chatter. We cannot let the information on the computer systems fall into the hands of the Ring. The consequences would be nearly as bad as the asset being captured. Do what it takes to protect Castle. And for god's sake, get some real food down there for future emergencies. Hot Pockets!" With a grunt that rivaled Casey, General Beckman abruptly cut the phone call off. Casey wouldn't haven expected anything less, although he was a little hurt by the cheap shot at his favorite food group.

* * *

The communications room on board the SSN Key West was cramped quarters on the best of days. With the Captain and two spooks in the room, there was barely room to breathe. After the Captain keyed in the videoconference, Chuck took the seat by the computer. Given the minimal space and lack of other options, Sarah elected to sit in Chuck's lap.

"This is the situation as we currently know it," said General Beckman staring into the video monitor. "At 0940 hours this morning a group of men launched an attack against Castle. Colonel Casey was in the Orange Orange at the time this all began, and has since locked down Castle. We are confident that this is an action by the Ring, as our satellites providing coverage for this area were all mysteriously taken off-line for servicing just before this all began. Both primary and backup power to Castle have been cut. In his last communication, Colonel Casey reported that he was unharmed, but, since power has been cut I have instructed him only to contact us on an as needed basis. We have personnel on the scene, but given the public nature of the assault, there is a significant presence of local law enforcement personnel so our agents are limited in their ability to gather relevant information."

"One moment, General," said Chuck as he reached over to a keyboard for a computer in front of him. He quickly began typing away at the key board. Sarah could barely see the lines of code he was typing before he'd move on to the next line of code.

"Mr. Bartowski," General Beckman snapped, "while we are aware of your proficiency with repairing computers, what what do you expect that you can do that my specialists here in Fort Meade are unable to do?"

"Well, General," Chuck replied as he continued typing away on the keyboard, "I hadn't talked much about my hacking background before our little adventure began, because I was concerned over whether the FBI or NSA might be looking for me. Honestly, I walked away from that world before the communication from Bryce Larkin. I never did anything bad, but at the time, there were few…well, very few, places that I couldn't get into if I wanted."

"Mr. Bartowski, I can assure you that at the start of your involvement in our Project you were thoroughly vetted. Neither the NSA nor the FBI had any interest in you before you received that email."

"She's right Chuck," Sarah interjected, surprised that Chuck had not only keep some of his background secret from the NSA and CIA, but that he'd never mentioned a hacking background to his girlfriend _…cover girlfriend, never mentioned it to his cover girlfriend._ "The CIA had very little on you, certainly nothing about any experience as a computer hacker."

"Well, I'm pretty sure there was some interest in finding me. But it wasn't Chuck Bartowski, or even Charles Carmichael, that they would have been looking for. Back then I dabbled in the hacker world using the handle 'The Piranha.' I did my best to keep him a ghost, but I'm pretty sure he was starting to attract a little heat. Now then, I believe I can access some other satellites that the Ring may not have been able to, or simply didn't think to, disable."

There was stunned silence from both General Beckman and Sarah. Both were well aware of the hacker known as The Piranha, although for somewhat different, albeit related, reasons. The NSA were well aware of the white hat hacker known as The Piranha, and once even had a small team dedicated to trying to locate him in order to bring him into the NSA fold. Chuck was right, The Piranha was a ghost, appearing and disappearing at will with no trace of where he came from or where he went. Beckman was shocked that she had had such a high value target on her team this whole time.

Still seated in Chuck's lap, Sarah had gone rigid at these words. Sarah had a far more practical reason for knowing of The Piranha. She had heard some murmurs at Langley about a hacker who accessed all sorts of government systems, including highly classified systems, but instead of causing havoc instead notified the system administrators of the flaws in their security systems so that other hackers wouldn't be able to duplicate his methods. It had been those activities that had brought Chuck's alter ego to the attention of the NSA and FBI.

Sarah, however, had been on a deep cover assignment in Kazakstan when The Piranha had notified the FBI of a mole on the staff of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee who had been sharing information with the Russian FSB. The Piranha notified the FBI that he had been playing Call of Duty when two of the players started communicating with each other, but not about the MMORPG. He had traced the online characters to their users computers, then breached the firewalls on each computer and realized that the unusual discussion had been a notification to the Russian spy of a dead drop.

The mole and his Russian handler had assumed that the online game would provide anonymity so that they could camouflage their messages in the heat of battle. Chuck dug deeper into the computer of the mole, and discovered the information that was to be delivered to the drop-namely information about a deep cover CIA agent in Kazakstan, including her cover name and cover job and physical description. Although the Russians learned of the CIA agent's cover name and job before Chuck could alert the Feds, the warning from The Piranha was early enough for the FBI to warn their CIA counterparts, who in turn were able to extract Sarah mere minutes before the FSB team arrived at her apartment to arrest her.

Sarah had always been grateful to the anonymous hacker who had not only saved her from a black mark on her record for a failed mission, but saved her from torture and years of imprisonment as she had been operating under a non-official cover (NOC). A CIA agent caught in a foreign country under a NOC didn't have the luxury of diplomatic immunity. They would be thrown in a deep hole, and could only hope that sometime down the road the US government would be able to arrange for a prisoner exchange in order to secure their freedom.

 _All this time, I thought that Chuck and I had crossed paths due to our respective ties to Bryce Larkin_ -it was still strange to her that she owed the greatest relationship of her life to her former partner/boyfriend. In reality though, their paths had crossed years before that, although Chuck had been hiding behind The Piranha handle, while Sarah masqueraded behind her cover name. Even back then Chuck was looking out for her, keeping her safe.

Both Sarah and Beckman refocused on the present when Chuck blurted out, "Got it!" Some murmuring followed, then rapid pounding on the keyboard, followed by, "This should work nicely."

"Mr. Bartowski, would you like to share with the class exactly what is it that you've got?" Beckman somehow managed to simultaneously look impressed with Chuck for hiding his hacker background and frustrated with his not saying what it was that he was up to.

"Ha ha," said Chuck, as he kept pounding away at the keyboard oblivious to the shocked looks on the faces of Sarah and General Beckman. "There is a Russian reconnaissance satellite that is over the area now. I was just convincing it that it is running a diagnostic test, so that we can discreetly use its cameras to see what is going on over at the Orange Orange, without the folks in Moscow being able to see what we see."

Sarah focused her attention on the video monitors in front of her. "Chuck, can you switch this feed from thermal to visual?" Sarah asked as she pointed to a particular feed. Chuck instantly started typing away. Moments later the view that Sarah requested was up on the monitor.

"Agent Walker, what is it you that you are seeing there," inquired General Beckman. "It seems Mr. Bartowski is more accomplished at gathering intel then my own specialists," she grumbled. Not only was he showing up her top personnel, but a hugely significant skill set had been left out of his write up at the start of the mission. Heads would be rolling once the immediate crisis was averted.

"Well, General," replied Sarah, "we have what appears to be 16 troops attacking the Orange Orange. Two are heavy gunners, the rest are equipped with small arms. The front door of the Orange Orange appears to have been damaged by an explosive. There is some ancillary damage to the roof that would explain the backup power being lost."

"It appears that Casey has neutralized four of the assault team. Also, while there is heavy damage to the windows and front door of the Orange Orange, the building itself seems to be intact. As you indicated General, there is a large police presence in the area around the Buy More Plaza, although they cordoned off well away from the Plaza itself."

"Mr. Bartowski," General Beckman interjected, "I hope that the Russians will not get wind of the fact that you have hijacked one of their reconnaissance satellites using highly classified technology from a Navy submarine. For that matter, we don't want the Russians to be able to reverse the field and penetrate the Key West's computer systems."

"No need to worry General," Chuck, replied. "I've piggybacked the feed off of a North Korean communication satellite. If the Russians look, they will be forced to conclude that it was the North Koreans who somehow access their system. I've already erased any traces of my back door entry into the North Korean satellite system. And for good measure, once we're done I will shut off the cooling systems to the Korean satellite causing all of its hardware to overheat."

"I'll just insert this here…And now it will look like a screw up by the North Korean Unit 121. Just think of this as a little payback for that hack of Sony Pictures. Nobody messes around with Spider-Man."

The sub skipper raised his eyebrows at the cool composure of the young man wielding the computer like a weapon. But as the NSA director herself appeared to be content with the methods used by the unlikely looking spook with ridiculously curly hair, that was good enough for the skipper. Deciding that he'd better get back to the conn, he excused himself from the room, trying to forget all that he'd heard as he was pretty sure that he wasn't cleared for most of it. He thought back to the intense glare of the beautiful spook when she had first come aboard the sub, "We were never here." That was probably the best advice he'd gotten all year. They simply were never there, so he didn't see or hear any of that.

"Hold on a second here," Chuck spoke to himself. "It looks like the Russian bird is able to pick up some chatter in addition to the overhead images. The location is definitely the Buy More Plaza, although I'm not sure if it's the Russian ReconSat or the kludge technology on the North Korean satellite, but I can't narrow it down much further. It appears to be encrypted voice communications, must be the Ring agents talking to each other."

"Chuck, are you sure about this? The NGIA has checked out that satellite, but had no indication that it had SigInt capabilities," General Beckman said as she reviewed the known information on the Russian satellite that Chuck had appropriated. She was so focused on the information, she didn't appear to have noticed using Chuck's first name. Chuck was likewise dialed in to the action and missed it himself. Sarah, however, was pleased at the slip up by the Director. It was a sign of just how impressed General Beckman was with Chuck's abilities that she was so informal in speaking to him.

"General," Sarah cut in, "there appear to be several encrypted signals in the area of the Orange Orange, but there is another lone signal in the Plaza, but further away. If I had to say, I'd guess that the assault team has themselves a spotter who was pre-positioned before all of this went down."

"General," Chuck questioned, "what information do we have on any threats beyond the Orange Orange?"

"At this time there is nothing Mr. Bartowski. Why do you ask?"

"Well, General, I don't think there was any threat to either me or Sarah. Information shows that the Ring had an inside source. An attack timed for just before all the stores open for business would mean there would be minimal civilians around. And neither Sarah nor I have seen anything remotely suspicious today. It seems to me, that this was an attack on Castle, probably to get our Ring intel. Sarah and I need to get back there and help Casey."

"Sarah, does anything about this attack strike you as strange?" Chuck asked, his attention locked onto the monitors in front of him.

"Yes, I was just thinking that myself," Sarah replied. "The squad attacking is set up in a half circle, which is efficient for laying down fire, but there's no sign of anyone watching for either an escape or for reinforcements from the rear of the Orange Orange."

"Their spotter must be somewhere behind the shop," Chuck responded. "Someone there that was watching, timing this attack. The question is where?"

"I've got it," he shouted a moment later. "The mini van with tinted windows. It's all by itself in the parking lot, but not right in front of the Underpants, Etc. General, do we have any information on how long that minivan has been parked there?"

"Let me get my personnel here working on that, as well as looking into the other information you've developed," Beckman responded. "15 minutes while trapped underwater in a submarine on an unfamiliar computer system and you've come up with far more information that the team of specialists I've got working under me here. I'm guessing that the NSA should have tried harder to track down The Piranha when they had the chance. Nice work."

Just as General Beckman was reaching for the button to kill the videoconference feed, she paused and looked back into the camera, "Oh, and Agent Walker, while I admire your dedication to preserving the cover even during such extreme circumstances, you should know that the Captain left Comms five minutes ago. I'm not sure that it was necessary for you to remain seated in Mr. Bartwoski's lap this entire time." With her trademark scowl, Beckman jabbed the disconnect button, ending the meeting with her usual lack of finesse.

Sarah flushed scarlet. She had been perfectly aware of when the Captain had left Comms, listening to be sure that the door was fully sealed. It simply hadn't occurred to her to leave her seat in Chuck's lap. From the moment she had heard the emergency evacuation signal on their phones, a deep seated fear for Chuck's safety had overwhelmed her thoughts. Given the cramped space inside the Communications room onboard the Key West, when it had been the three of them, it had made sense for her to sit in Chuck's lap as there simply wasn't enough space to go around. But once there, the physical contact with Chuck had calmed her fears and let her concentrate her considerable focus, intelligence and skills on the task ahead.

Sarah's blush grew deeper as she realized that when she had sat in Chuck's lap, not only had her right arm draped around his shoulders, but at some point on its own volition her right hand had started to play with the curls sticking out over the collar of his shirt. While she was able to still her fingers, she was unwilling, unable even, to give up the physical connection to Chuck- even after Beckman had called her out on it.


	5. Chapter 5

A/N This is near the halfway point in the story in terms of story length-for now at least. I got a review to the story that made me delete what had been one line in the epilogue and replace it with twelve paragraphs. The changes now require me to shuffle around some of the latter parts of the story. It's a lot more work, but it was fun to write. The next few chapters are a little shorter, but I'm going to stick to the same upload schedule so that I have time to make the revisions to the chapters down the road.

Chapter 6: Chuck versus the Navy SEALs

"Commander, what kind of shape is your squad currently in?"

The SEAL team leader looked at the cold stare of the beautiful woman in front of him and realized that he would not want to go up against her in combat. She was here to talk business, he would do just that.

"Overall, we are in good shape. We had some contact at the end, one of our guys got nicked up. What is the operation?"

"There are components that you are not cleared to hear about. However, the broad stroke picture is we are up against a 14 to 16 member assault team, likely mercenaries with military and possibly special forces training. Suburban environment in Los Angeles, Burbank to be precise, with lots of civilians around. My partner on the scene is reportedly uninjured, but surrounded and outnumbered. He is heavily armed, well-trained and exceedingly skilled. We want to take out the assault team and take them out quickly."

Just then the door opened one of the SEAL team members charged into the ready room. "Skip, we got a problem. Murphy tried to get out of the bunk in medical and hit the deck. The doctor thinks the cracked rib has punctured his pericardium. He needs surgery, and we don't have enough time to get to Coronado. What do we do?"

Out of the corner of her eye Sarah saw Chuck sit upright as his eyelids fluttered. Fortunately, the two SEALs were too focused on discussing the condition of their fellow teammate to notice. Chuck looked over at Sarah and tapped the side of his head. "Commander, if I may, I know how to do the type of surgery your man needs."

The SEAL team leader looked at Chuck, who had been quiet and apparently in a bit of a daze for throughout most of the conversation. Now, however, he was looking at the Commander with focus and confidence. Although the Commander had never worked with Sarah, he nevertheless looked to her for confirmation. Still with the piercing cold blue stare, she gave a firm nod indicating that she was completely confident in Chuck's abilities. The four of them made their way to sick bay. When they got there the sub's corpsman explained to the Commander what had happened. The look on his face revealed that he did not think the injured SpecOps warrior was going to have the time to make it back to the base. "Sir, the x-rays confirmed that one of the cracked ribs has now pierced the pericardium. It's a very difficult procedure, and one I don't think I could perform with any chance of saving your man."

In sick bay, Chuck and Sarah were looking over the x-rays of the patient. Sarah turned to Chuck and asked, "Chuck have you got this?"

"I got this," Chuck responded although looking a little green. "Man, I have no idea how Awesome does this on a daily basis."

The SEAL team leader hearing the end of the conversation looked at Sarah with a question on his face.

"His brother-in-law is one of the top heart surgeons in LA," she responded. "Although having heard that information, we now need you to forget all about it," she added with a hard glint that let the Commander know that she would not tolerate any threat towards the tall curly haired man about to operate on the injured Navy SEAL.

As the other two SEALs exited sick bay, the corpsman strapped the wounded soldier to the operating table, and ran a bag of saline with morphine drip. He, Chuck, and Sarah all scrubbed up to participate in the operation. Sarah knew that Chuck was not comfortable with the sight of blood, but was immensely proud of him for volunteering to do the surgery. It may have been the Intersect that gave him the knowledge of what to do, but it was all Chuck that gave him the courage to step up and act on that knowledge.

An hour later the SSN Key West tied off underneath a specially covered dock at its current homeport in San Diego. By then, the surgery was not only complete, but was a complete success. Word quickly spread among the rest of the SEAL team that their brother had been saved by the actions of Special Agent Carmichael. As if that weren't reason enough for the men to appreciate the tall stranger with a friendly smile, and his beautiful partner, they were now offering the team a chance to take down some terrorists who were dumb enough to try to operate on US soil.

"Now this group that we are about to go against appears to be skilled and well armed," Sarah said that the men assembled in the hanger near the sub base. "The mild-mannered looking building they're attacking actually houses a highly classified CIA/NSA substation that has an armory with enough explosives to level most of Los Angeles. It is also currently being defended by a former Force Recon Marine who loves nothing better than blowing things up and shooting terrorists."

"Given the fact that the assault team began shooting when they saw Colonel Casey standing inside the business, it is our belief that they intended to get into the substation in order to access the computer systems there, rather than either capture the Colonel. And believe me, the only way they will set foot inside that fake shop is if Casey is already dead."

"As we speak, an MV 22 Osprey is heading to this hanger. The plan is to fly over Burbank and do a Halo jump at 30,000 feet. Special Agent Carmichael here obtained the overhead imagery of the shopping plaza. He also obtained thermal scans which show an additional person in the minivan in the top corner of the parking lot in addition to the assault team laying siege to our base. We are going to have a Reaper drone on station being controlled by Agent Carmichael, which will provide us with realtime intel as we near the scene and during the takedown. The Reaper is equipped with a new directional electromagnetic pulse device. Just before we deploy, the Reaper will do a low altitude pass over the target area and knock out all the electronic devices. "

"As this is a directional EMP device, our comms will not be affected, while the opposition force should be offline. Agent Carmichael and I will deploy to the roof of this building, and then rappel down to secure the minivan. Your team will deploy to the roof of the BuyMore store. Your Commander will take over the briefing from here."

Striding to the front of the meeting space, Mancuso looked each member of his team in the eye, "Alright men, you know Doc here saved your teammate. Now we're gonna go save his teammate. Bear in mind that this Marine fended off a surprise attack by 16 commandos, has held them off for a couple hours, and took out four them without even getting a scratch. Even though he's a Marine, that is still a man worth saving."

The SEAL Team laughed at the inter-service jab, but looked at the images on the video screens with respect for man able to hold off such a force on his own.

"Now, as Agent Walker indicated, we will deploy onto the roof of the Buy More located only a few yards away from the objective Orange Orange. Jimenez will be on the roof handling sniper duty and overwatch. Jonesy, Borodin, you boys are assigned to Tango One as Alpha team. As you can see from the imagery, this appears to be an 84 mm recoilless rifle. Based on the bodies on the ground, Colonel Casey appears to have killed the rifle operator and SAW gunners, but we need to make sure that the recoilless and the machine guns stay out of play."

"Bravo team will take out the machine gun designated Tango Two. Charlie team you get machine gun designated Tango Three. Delta team will be with me, we will utilize the roof access entrance to the Buy More store itself. At my command we will attack the assault team from the main entrance while at the same time Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Jimenez pick off their targets. Once the recoilless rifle and machine guns are neutralized, each team is clear to engage any target of opportunity. Any questions?"

"Yeah, I've got a question," Miles O'Neil shouted. "Why is Blondie here hanging out with Doc? He's packing tranq guns for Christ's sake. Why don't you partner up with me and I can show you how a real man fights," he added with a leer. Miles always pictured himself as a winner with the ladies. The ladies in question usually begged to differ.

Before any of the assembled team could blink, a knife appeared, pinning the sleeve of Miles' BDU to the table in front of him, while Sarah quickly delivered a spinning roundhouse kick to the man's head. The SEALs were elite fighters, but they never even saw her draw the knife, nor had they seen anyone move that fast. There had been a blur of blonde hair and then their teammate was out cold. O'Neil was a hell of a teammate to have in a firefight, but the rest of the time he was just a pain in the ass, even to his fellow SEALs.

"Anyone else want to insult my boyfriend?"

The only sound in the hanger was the distant sounds from the pier outside.

"Wow," Chuck murmurs. "You are awesome. Scary, but awesome, and so, so, so totally badass!"


	6. Chapter 6

A/N: Disclaimer-this chapter veers away from the action for a bit to get into the thoughts Chuck and Sarah are going through. It is also on the short side. Not to worry, the next chapter jumps into the action with both feet. Literally. Also, thanks to everyone for reading and more thanks to those who have posted reviews. In addition to getting some amazing encouragement, a couple of the reviews made me add to what I had in the future chapters, making the story much stronger. With that said, the story was mostly written by the time I posted the first chapter, with plans to tinker with the story. With the upcoming additions, there have been more drastic rearrangements than just tinkering. I should still be posting every 5-7 days, depending on how many changes get put in and how much real life interferes with writing. I just want to make sure the changes don't interfere with the timeline-like a secondary character being seen to be killed two chapters before it happened.

Chapter 7: Chuck versus the Insecurities

Sarah let out a breath she barely realized she had been holding. It was moments such as this that she always feared. Moments when her true nature revealed itself to Chuck. She dreaded those moments when Chuck saw the Enforcer take over. She lived in a constant state of fear that something she would do, say or even wear would cause Chuck to flash on some of her past missions. Fear over his learning what she had done that had earned her the nickname "Graham's Wildcard Enforcer." Fear over how he would look at her, how he would be able to care for her, once he knew the gritty details of the things she had done in the past.

Sarah knew that on those missions it had either been kill or be killed. She also knew that she was a different agent, a different person, from the woman who had first walked into the Burbank BuyMore. She was aware that the men and women she had killed were so vile that they only qualified as human beings on the DNA level. But she hadn't merely killed, she excelled at it. She went into situations against impossible odds, and came out unscathed although often covered in the blood of her targets.

Despite the words, actions and looks from Chuck that proved how deeply he cared for her, Sarah could not understand how someone so inherently good could care for someone with so much blood on her hands. She saw the proof of his feelings on a daily basis, and knew without a doubt that Chuck would be empathetic to what she had done in order to survive those missions. Even now, his eyes shone with admiration for her skill at shutting down the blowhard O'Neil.

Those fears were also wrapped around Chuck's insecurities regarding Bryce Larkin. The haunted look in his eyes when he compared himself to Bryce, or the self-deprecating comments that proved that Chuck truly believed that he could never compete with the "superspy". But what Chuck couldn't, or wouldn't, see was that it was Bryce who did not match up to Chuck. No one she knew or even heard of could compete with his goodness, his intelligence, his care and compassion, and his boundless empathy for others, even when those others were his enemy.

Bryce had made many sacrifices along his path to becoming a spy. He was smart (a pre-requisite for attending Stanford), handsome, athletically gifted (a member of both Stanford's track and gymnastics teams), and popular on campus, yet Bryce had openly acknowledged that he had only one true friend (which spoke volumes to his relationship with Sarah when they were partners). Bryce had also willingly ended that friendship in order to try to keep Chuck out of the CIA's clutches.

Bryce still had to answer for that decision to sacrifice his one true friendship without giving his friend the right to decide his own future for himself. And it still didn't make sense. How Bryce could deprive the CIA of the best potential candidate for the Omaha project, yet refuse to disclose his involvement in the CIA to Chuck?

The thought of Bryce's comment that he had only one true friend in life brought back memories of his betrayal of their partnership when he stole the Intersect and sent it to Chuck. Why hadn't he trusted her with the Sandwall mission? Why didn't he get her help to steal the Intersect? Why hadn't he trusted her with protecting Chuck? While that betrayal still stung, muted by the reason why he kept her out and away from Fulcrum, Sarah was forever indebted to Bryce as it was his act of sending the Intersect to Chuck that caused her to meet the one man who loved her for who she was, rather than how she looked. The one man who filtered all of her actions so as to only see the positive.

When she and Bryce had been partners, Bryce had been willing to blur the lines between their professional lives and a personal relationship. He had been willing to put his life in her hands on mission after mission as the Andersons. He had expected her to put her life in his hands as well. Despite all of that, he wasn't willing to confide in her, to trust her with the information on Fulcrum and his gambit to steal the Intersect.

But, back when Bryce was her partner and lover ( _damn Carina for letting that particular cat out of the bag_ ), her time with him had been superficial. They ghosted from mission to mission, country to country, creating classified memories but no roots. They had both bought into the line that spies don't fall in love. Sarah had never questioned that unwritten rule…until Burbank. Recently, she started to question it. A lot.

Although Bryce had made countless sacrifices during his career as a spy (and even as a student at Stanford), Chuck was the master of self-sacrifice. He absolutely loathed lying to his family and friends, not because it meant that he wasn't able to boast about how he had saved the day (again and again and again on a pretty much weekly basis), but because he believed wholeheartedly that it was wrong to lie.

Sarah clearly recalled when Chuck had effortlessly lied to Ellie and Devon, and the haunted look in his eyes when Casey had complimented him on being a "real spy" for lying so well. Chuck hated lying, because good guys are supposed to tell the truth-and no one was as good as Chuck. Without anything else, the self-loathing over lying was proof to Sarah of just how special Chuck Bartowski was.

But Chuck's self-sacrifice wasn't limited to betraying his personal code of conduct by lying. Chuck routinely sacrificed his time, energy and even dignity at his meaningless job at the BuyMore. He never thought twice about making those sacrifices for co-workers who frequently didn't acknowledge, usually didn't notice, and most assuredly didn't deserve his good deeds on their behalf.

Then there were his actions that he blindly failed to recognize as being heroic: saving a hotel full of innocents from a Serbian bomb; saving his best friend (as well as the Chinese ambassador) from a Triad bomb; saving his sister with a poison antidote while being poisoned himself; running into a contaminated conference room to save Casey from a deadly toxin; stealing back crucial technology from a gang of heavily armed mercenaries while armed only with his considerable wits (not to mention saving her and Casey in the process). Even his actions at their first meeting, walking away from a beautiful woman who was flirting with him in order to save the day of a young ballerina.

Chuck had also saved Sarah by offering to share his roots in LA with her, welcoming her into his family, making his roots her roots. With Chuck there came the opportunity to be part of something both normal and extraordinary. A member not just of a family, but the Bartowski family. The best part of that was to Chuck, Ellie and even Devon, it wasn't unusual, it was just the way they treated family. But to anyone else, particularly Sarah with her roughshod upbringing, it was heartwarmingly special.

Devon was thrilled to have someone eager for the extreme sports that he enjoyed, and more thrilled by the way Sarah brought Chuck out of his shell and had him finally living up to the potential that had always lurked behind the Nerd Herd uniform. Ellie accepted Sarah as the most important person in Chuck's life, ceding the title without any acrimony. But Ellie had also embraced Sarah as a friend in her own right. A smart, beautiful, truly incredible woman who accepted Sarah as her equal, without any clue as to Sarah's real occupation.

Sarah's time with Bryce had been fast-paced, exciting, dangerous, sometimes glamorous, and sometimes in exotic locales. Other times that life had been experienced in run down bodegas, hearts of jungles where humidity seemed to exceed 120% and mosquitoes were nearly as big as the elephants, where snakes would assume that a sleeping bag was a new home intended for them rather than the CIA agent. For her part, Sarah had never been willing to find out whether or not those snakes were poisonous. She erred on the side of poisonous and got as far away as possible, as quickly as possible, without spoiling the mission.

With Bryce there had been plenty of adrenaline, a fair share of passion, but no care, no compassion, no real comfort. If Sarah wasn't able to keep up, she knew that she would be left behind on the mission, and the same held true for Bryce. Sarah never doubted that Chuck would leave her behind, even when she would want or tell him to-his actions against Dr. Zarnow established that fact early in their relationship… _partnership, early in their partnership_.

She had been somewhat distracted in thinking about Chuck and Bryce, but she was distinctly aware that she was being closely watched. She strapped on some body armor, being sure to run her hands over her body as though checking to make sure it was secure. In reality, she was checking to make sure of her effect in distracting her observer. It took a lot of discipline to keep from laughing at the way Chuck's mouth dropped open at her blatant display.

* * *

Chuck had been enjoying discretely watching Sarah as she geared up for their mission to save Casey. It was always a rare event when he was able to watch her without her knowing, to see her without the various mental shields that she used to convey whatever image she chose to her audience. As he watched her sensuously strap on her kevlar vest, a part of his mind realized that she must have spotted him observing her, but his higher brain function started malfunctioning, before seizing completely.

As always, he felt a sense of awe over the woman who was Sarah Walker. He knew that she had gone by hundreds of names in her career with the CIA, and in her cons with her father before that. He was aware that she had been called upon to perform some horrible things in order to keep the world a safer place. He also knew that the person that existed behind the Sarah Walker persona was a special person, an incredible, unique and intelligent human being. She was fiercely loyal, not only to Chuck, but also Casey, Ellie and Devon.

Ellie had picked up on how special Sarah truly was, without even knowing about her hidden life and the things Sarah had done for the country and for Chuck. Ellie had noticed Sarah's tendencies to do small, kind gestures when no one (except for the eagle eyed Ellie Bartowski) was looking. Not trying to get accolades or thanks, nor draw attention to herself had endeared her to Ellie early on.

After one of their couples dinner parties at Casa Bartowski, Ellie had let Chuck in on some of these secret gestures. Sarah had noticed that Chuck's wine glass had gotten perilously close to the edge of the table. When Chuck had reached down the table for the tray of green bean casserole, Sarah had casually slid both elbows onto the table, pushing the wine glass forward several inches in the process with her left elbow. There had been the time when Devon had jumped to his feet to cheer on a UCLA play in a football game on the tv, and Sarah cleared away his dirty dishes in the blink of an eye, so that Awesome could focus on his team.

Turning away as Sarah finished gearing up before the flight, Chuck marveled once again at the fact that such an amazing woman found him to be worthy of her. As Sarah checked the clip on her Smith & Wesson before placing it into her tactical thigh holster, Chuck realized that it was time for him to focus all of his energy on the mission ahead. Casey needed them. Time to go to work.


	7. Chapter 7

A/N Thank you again to the reviewers. I had been leery about putting introspection into an action story, so the positive responses were greatly appreciated. With that said, we're back with the action in this chapter. With all the reshuffling I've done to the story, this chapter wound up being somewhat lengthy.

Any words in italics indicate the thoughts of the character.

Chapter 8: Chuck versus The Drop

Jonesey sidled up to Mancuso as the SEALs headed out to the flight line, when the MV-22 landed a short distance from the hangar, ramp down and guns manned.

"Skip, just who in the hell are these two? I've never seen any move as fast as Agent Walker when she used that pig sticker to teach O'Neil a lesson. Then there is Carmichael, who does a ridiculously complex surgery inside of a sub without assistance, after hacking a Russian satellite to get overhead imagery. In zero time they get JSOC to green light an unplanned military mission being led by spooks on US soil. That means they had to get clearance from 1600. The President had to get briefed and clear the use of troops operating domestically. Plus they had the juice to re-route a SpecOps sub for a helo drop. Now they've got an MV-22 loaded down with every toy imaginable, fresh gear for us and a dedicated Reaper on station?"

"Jonesy, anybody with that much juice? You're better off not knowing. I've got zero intel on the guy, but as for Agent Walker, if she's who I think she is, O'Neil should be grateful that he's still among the living."

"C'mon, Skip. You can't say something like that and then just leave me hanging," Jonesey retorted with a wry grin.

"Okay, okay," Mancuso replied as he ran a hand through his close cropped salt and pepper hair. "I had some friends when I was coming up through the Teams who were temporarily dispatched to the CIA's Special Activities Division (SAD). A call came in that three agents were about to be overrun by Chechen terrorists. The SAD boys tracked a beacon to a warehouse on the outskirts of Grozniy. When they breached the doors, they found the bodies of two dead agents and a beautiful blonde agent who was seriously wounded. Around them were the bodies of 16 Chechens. One guy described it as a blood bath of mangled bodies, and that it had all been the work of the wounded woman. Even weak from blood loss and fighting off that many men, she was still ruthlessly lethal."

"Turned out the Chechens had been tipped off by some loser stateside with clearance who was looking for a quick and easy payday. You know the deal, the guy was too well connected to get arrested. No concrete evidence, but everybody knew. The day after this blonde CIA agent gets out of the hospital, the weasel disappears. Cops found his body three days later. 26 knives sticking out of him. He had eventually, slowly and painfully bled out, but the coroner's report pointed out that each of the blades had been stuck in without hitting any major artery. It took a whole lot of skill to use that many knives to kill someone that slowly."

"The word from the SAD troops familiar with the agent was that this beautiful blonde had more confirmed kills than our whole squad has had combined. There just can't be that many CIA agents who are so gorgeous that she would make Sports Illustrated swimsuit models look plain if the magazine were to put photos of her in the same issue, and who are also that good with a knife. A no look throw that pinned Miles's arm to the bulletin board? I never even saw where the knife came from. She never looked at her target, yet she didn't draw blood. I'll bet you a week's pay that she knew that if the squad was down a second man that we'd have trouble operating."

"No bet, skipper. Have you noticed how she is around Carmichael? Always positioning her body between him and any potential threat. It doesn't even look as though she even has to think about it, protecting Carmichael to her is as natural as breathing. I guarantee you that nobody in the hangar missed the 'boyfriend' reference. And none of us can figure out if we should feel jealous or sorry for the guy."

"Both," Mancuso responded with a wry grin. With that Mancuso and Jones shared a quiet laugh before grabbing their go bags and climbed aboard the aircraft, mentally preparing to go into harms way once again.

* * *

Inside the minivan, Daniel Shaw was fuming as he listed to the reports from the Ring commandos to their base. He had warned them that the store windows were bulletproof. He had warned them that John Casey was a deadly foe that they didn't want to tangle with head on. The fools had botch their mission from the start. It was clear that if he was going to save the operation and get access to Castle's computers, he was going to have to take matters to hand.

The recoilless rifle shooter was down, as were both SAW gunners. There were still plenty of troops to keep Casey pinned down, and the police at bay, but the police could afford to play the waiting game. For this mission to be a success, there had to be a drastic change from the original plan. After breaching protocol by contacting the Squad leader via his Ring communicator, Shaw checked to make sure that the clip in his gun was full, and a round loaded into the chamber before jumping out of the minivan to join in the action. He knew what needed to be done, and he was the one to get the job done- regardless of whether any of the commandos survived. They were hired guns anyway, mere cannon fodder for his goals.

After circling the OO, he approached the squad leader, identifying himself as the Ring spotter. Just as he was about to tell the leader of the revised plan of attack, he saw one of his mercenaries reload the recoilless rifle. His frustration and anger morphed into rage when the incompetent fool fired yet another round into the OO front door. The metal was twisted like a pretzel, but the reinforced door was still largely in place, blocking access.

Shaw couldn't take the chance that any more recoilless rounds would be wasted. He drew his FN7 pistol and walked over to the idiot and put a bullet in the back of the man's head, as the man had stared at the doorframe, unable to comprehend how two RPGs had failed to flatten the entire building. Shaw loaded the last of the high explosive recoilless rounds into the weapon and fired into the middle of the large windows. The large frame window was explosive proof, but didn't have the structural reinforcement of the front door, and the force of the explosion caused the entire window to crash backwards into the shop.

Shaw bent down, removed an H&K MP5 from one of the dead mercenaries, then stashed a couple of spare clips in his back pocket before jogging across the parking lot to enter the OO. He approached the breach from an angle, to minimize the chance that Casey would see him, if the Colonel had been foolish enough to remain on the ground level.

* * *

For the second time that day, air traffic around LA was diverted as a direct flight path was cleared for the Osprey. It was no small task clearing a path from Coronado to Burbank. An NBC executive, too caught up in his own self-importance as well as his new toy jet, discovered his own insignificance as a pair of F-15s redirected him to Nellis AFB, his own personal holding cell, and his own personal DHS interrogator. His absence wasn't too great for NBC, as he was unpopular for continually threatening to shut down a popular show about a computer geek and a CIA agent.

Meanwhile, the SEALs triple checked their equipment, with particular attention to the parachutes that each was about to risk his life with in a few minutes. Too much was on the line to risk mission failure to due a defective parachute, dead battery or broken switch. As the SEALs checked their gear, Chuck familiarized himself with the controls and features of the Reaper drone tasked to their mission. While he preferred to take things apart and tinker with them (usually improving them in the process), this time he had to learn on the fly- literally.

As the SEALs started to check their guns, grenades and knives, Sarah subconsciously moved to position herself between the elite troops and Chuck. While the odds of one of the squad being a Ring agent were slim, they were not non-existent, and therefore were too great a risk for Sarah to accept when it came to Chuck's safety. Jonesey noticed the move, then looked back over his shoulder to share the private, silent joke with Mancuso who merely shook his head while grinning.

As the flight neared Burbank, the pilot altered the flight path so that when the team jumped out, they would be parachuting towards the Buy More Plaza with the sun at their backs to reduce the risk of the mercenaries on the ground seeing their approach and being able to attack when the team was the most vulnerable. The altitude of the MV-22, combined with the noise of the news helicopters hovering over the Plaza, prevented the mercenaries or their traitorous leader from hearing the team's approach.

The MV-22 Osprey approached the Buy More Plaza drop zone for the SEAL team, the CIA agent and the man who was a little more difficult to explain. Chuck had gone forward to a computer station built into the aircraft just behind the pilot jump seat. He was remotely controlling the Reaper drone that General Beckman had tasked to their mission. The video feed was several generations better than the images relayed by the Russian satellite. Chuck had visual and heat signature tracking on all of the Ring troopers still alive. With his years of familiarity with the Buy More Plaza, he didn't need any map overlay to know exactly where each man was.

Armed with that knowledge, Chuck powered up the primary Reaper weapon for this Op- a directional EM pulse. He would be able to fry all the circuitry in the Ring communicators and any other computer equipment the enemy force had. Castle was shielded to withstand a nearby EMP, so Casey shouldn't be affected. That being said, they'd never tested out the shielding, as most EMPs were omnidirectional, and would destroy the entire stock of the Buy More, much of the stock at Large Mart, as well as every cash register and ATM anywhere in a square block radius. Chuck figured that a fried cash register would be another reason for Lou to ban him from her deli if she ever learned the truth about him.

Chuck, being the nerd that he was, had read up, as much as he could on the short flight, about the Reaper's directional electromagnetic pulse generator. He did not have the luxury of testing it out, and had to err on the side of caution and broadcast over a larger area than a more experienced operator would- but no operator would be more familiar with the terrain than Chuck, so it wound up off-setting.

"Man, I really hope Big Mike has his insurance paid up. If I'm off by a little bit, the Buy More is going to be out of business. All those flatscreen tvs will be nothing but oversized paperweights."

Sarah shifted her position to lay a hand on his left shoulder. No words were necessary. She could feel him relax from her simple touch. She knew that Chuck was drawing confidence from her very presence, and the fact that she was able to do that for him was truly awesome. Despite her fears at the start of Operation Bartowski, and continuing on since then, Sarah was starting to accept the fact that she was capable of providing emotional support to someone she loved. Between their rides on the helicopter, sub and now tilt rotor aircraft, combined with her fears over the risks Chuck was about to take, freed Sarah to admit-to herself at least-how she felt for Chuck.

Sarah realized that she wasn't as damaged and flawed as she had always believed herself to be. She recognized that this capacity to support and care for someone else was enabled by being around Chuck, Ellie, Devon and even (to a far lesser degree) Morgan. She couldn't have been there emotionally for any other boyfriend, as no one else was either willing or able to get past the shell and see the real woman currently known as Sarah Walker.

She now was Sarah Walker. It was Sarah that Chuck had fallen in love with, Sarah that he had accepted with all of her self-doubts and issues. In her dreams she now even thought of herself as Sarah Walker. For her, there was no going back. It was clear to everyone that Chuck was in love with Sarah Walker, and she could now admit that she both loved and needed Chuck. So Sarah Walker it was and would always be. _Well, unless it became Sarah Bartowski_ …The very thought shocked her, as did the realization that she wasn't terrified of the idea. In fact, she rather liked the sound-and the implication-of it.

Turning her attention back to the computer monitors, she saw Chuck toggle the locations of the Ring agents and their vehicle. "Commander," Chuck quickly called over to Mancuso, "you're going to need to see this." As Mancuso moved over to look over Chuck's other shoulder, Chuck pointed out the SUV that had just skirted the police barricades and pulled up to the BuyMore loading dock. Six heavily armed men could be seen sprinting from the SUV into the building. "There's more. The man from the minivan just went over to the opposition force. Looks like he shot one of his own. He's the one Sarah and I are after."

Mancuso was silent for a moment, looking at the screen from the Reaper video feed. He then marched back over to his troops, with Sarah and Chuck listening in while staying at the computer to control the Reaper and monitor the feeds. Mancuso was brief, "Men, we are modifying the plan. Jimenez, you are going to be responsible for the recoilless rifle. Alpha team, you've got responsibility for the SAW machine gun one. Bravo team, you've got SAW two. Charlie, you boys will be responsible for keeping their troops from entering the shop. Jimenez, once you've dealt with the recoilless, I want you providing close support to our two spooks."

"Delta team, you will be with me. There are now hostiles inside of the BuyMore. We will breach the BuyMore and take down the new group of mercenaries, designated Tango Four. We are one minute out from the drop. The Osprey will shift into helicopter mode two hundred yards northwest of the BuyMore roof. There is a slight breeze to the southwest so we will have an easy drop onto an unfortified target. Remember, there are a lot of noncombatants in the area down there, including local law enforcement. Fire discipline is crucial on this op."

"Miles, you are now tasked to the CIA. They are going after the leader of this group, and you are the best at close quarters combat in this group…" Mancuso paused to look at Agent Walker briefly, "at least the best among the SEALs. You will guard their backs, and you will keep your trap shut. If you fail in either one of these tasks, I will shred whatever body parts are left over after Walker here is done with you. She is in command of Echo team. Your vocabulary is limited to 'yes ma'am' and 'no ma'am' until further notice. Clear?"

"Aye, aye skipper," as subdued O'Neil responded. The bravado from inside the hangar was gone. Whether the absence of arrogance was because a mission was on hand, or because he was completely outmatched against Agent Walker, was up for debate. Mancuso was relieved that the man was acting like a professional again. He wasn't comfortable pairing Miles with the spooks, but if their target was in the middle of the mercenaries, instead of isolated in a minivan, O'Neil was the best option for helping them take down their target.

Sarah was stunned at the speech. She had felt Chuck briefly stiffen at their mention as "our spooks" for the SEALs. He hadn't been a part of the shadow world for too long, and had been press-ganged into service at the start. But he had learned enough to recognize the honor that came when elite troops accepted you as one of their own. But to have the SEAL commander acknowledge her skill at CQC as being equal to or above that of his unit, and then to put her in charge of a team that included one of his troops?

As a SpecWar commander, Sarah knew that Mancuso's viewpoint was distilled down to a simple question. It wasn't a question of gender, race, political affiliation. To him the only question that mattered was: who is the best to get the job done? Mancuso's job involved risking life and limb even more frequently than her job did. For him the equation was simple: whoever can get the job done the best and the fastest gets the gig.

The SEALs were each elite troopers who were highly trained and well equipped. It took a lot to gain their respect. She looked hard at Mancuso. With her prolific memory and attention to detail, she knew without a doubt that she had never worked with him in the past. But she was certain that he had heard of the Wild Card Enforcer, and had figured out that she was that agent.

Chuck called Mancuso over, and using his detailed knowledge of the BuyMore, showed the Commander where the roof access was, as well as a description of getting into the BuyMore unobserved from the roof. The Commander, needless to say, was both impressed and rather confused at how familiar this spook was with a retail box store located in Burbank.

Before he realized it, the minute was up. With a hastily whispered prayer to whatever deity it was that oversaw spooks and spec ops troops, Chuck entered the command to the Reaper to fire its EM pulses. Just as the weapon went active, MV-22 engine nacelles rotated to vertical, and the red warning light buzzed, alerting the team that the aft ramp was lowering and it was time to leap out of a perfectly good airplane into the void 30,000 feet above the ground.

Chuck and Sarah were the last in line, Chuck was busy securing his Orion wrist computer through which he could control the Reaper while on the ground-or rooftop as it were. Sarah had been walking around in her wing suit. As Chuck came to a stop in front of her, she clipped onto the back of his wing suit, so that they could tandem jump down to the Underwear Etc. roof. Tandem jumping also gave her some reassurance that she would be able to do everything possible to keep Chuck safe this way, as she was not happy with the thought of him free falling into a combat zone. But Casey needed them, and she knew that she had to go help out her partner, and Chuck had to as well.

Belatedly, she thought about the fact that if Chuck got hurt, Ellie would kill her when she found out. And when Ellie found out that she was there with Chuck, Ellie would then revive Sarah just to kill her again. As if her desperate need to keep Chuck safe wasn't a strong enough motivator, her fear of facing the wrath of Eleanor Bartowski would have been a good enough motivator in its own right. Sarah was much happier dealing with Ellie Bartowski. Hell, even Casey was intimidated by Eleanor.

As the CIA's top agent, she knew that she could take Eleanor in a fight, but to win would require inflicting some serious damage- and given the incredible person that Ellie Bartowski was, and how important their friendship had become independent of Sarah's relationship with Chuck, she wanted to avoid upsetting Ellie if at all possible. Just the thought of Ellie being hurt made Sarah feel queasy.

Latched on to Chuck's back, Sarah could feel him taking in a couple of deep breaths, clearly psyching himself up for the jump into the air several miles above Los Angeles. "Chuck, don't think about the drop, just look at how amazing LA is from up here. You focus on that, I'll focus on getting us to land where we need to." After giving Chuck a quick kiss on the cheek from over his shoulder (not easy to do given his lanky build), she patted both hands twice on his shoulders, the signal for him to jump straight back off of the ramp. Leaning forward just before they jumped out, Sarah shouted into Chuck's ear, "Just watch out for that first step. It's a doozy!" She knew there was a big Bartowski grin on his face as he launched into the ether. _He is turning me into such a nerd. A Merrie Melodies quote just before heading into battle. That's a first. Carina wouldn't even recognize me._


	8. Chapter 8

A/N: The action is picking up the pace in this chapter- thanks in part to a comment in a review by Deathzbreath who has been looking forward to the battle. The original draft had focused more heavily on Chuck and Sarah, but as the premise of the story is how the Team responds to an attack on Castle, I decided to expand the description of the battle itself. With that being said, there's still plenty of Chuck and Sarah. There are still a couple of chapters to go, as well as an epilogue that keeps getting longer every week.

As before, any words in italics represent the thoughts of that character

Chapter 9: Chuck versus the Battle for BuyMoria

Once separated from the plane, Sarah signaled to Chuck to spread his arms and legs, as she mirrored his position from his back. Given his bigger size, there wasn't a lot of air being trapped by her wing suit, but the lift generated by his wing suit was more than enough for the two of them. With slight pressure from her hand to Chuck's arm, or her foot to Chuck's leg, she was able to get him to steer their descent right to the perfect glide path for the roof of Underpants Etc. She yanked the cord to deploy her parachute at the optimal height, safely depositing them on the rooftop.

Just as they touched down on the roof, O'Neil flared to a silent drop only feet away from them. The SEAL was clearly skilled and experienced at these type of operations-although Chuck and Sarah were sure that he had to be a little out of sorts going on an Op inside the United States. O'Neil quickly secured his parachute, moving behind an air conditioning unit to look over the edge of the store to the parking lot between them and their objective.

"Ma'am," he began, keeping his eyes forward at all times. "Given the positions of the heavy gunners that Alpha and Bravo are tasked to take out, our best bet to get you two close to the store while minimizing the risk of friendly fire would be to position onto the roof of the shop."

Sarah still hadn't forgiven O'Neil, more for his insult to Chuck than for his boorish behavior. However, she recognized his professionalism and was grateful for his presence, at it should mean that Chuck would be safer. Sarah reached into the pack she had strapped to her chest during the HALO jump. Pulling out a piton gun, she waited for a burst of gunfire from the Ring troops towards the OO to cover the sound of the piton being shot into the side of the OO air handler on the shop's roof. No one had ever commented on the unusually large size of the air handler atop the frozen yogurt shop, but then no one likely suspected that the housing for the air handler also housed an air scrubber designed to clear Castle of any toxic gases released inside.

The size of the air handler didn't concern her at the moment. Its size would shield her and Chuck from the view of the mercenaries when they were on the roof of the OO. Despite Chuck's enhanced skills with the Intersect 2.0, Sarah was still uncomfortable with the fact that he would momentarily be alone in the heart of what was, in essence, a combat zone. Sarah handed harnesses to O'Neil and Chuck, while strapping her own harness on.

"O'Neil, you will zipline down to the roof first, and provide cover for me and Special Agent Carmichael," Sarah said staring hard at O'Neil while emphasizing "special". "Carmichael and I will then deploy down. You will then provide suppression fire so that Ch- Agent Carmichael and I can gain entry to the shop."

"Roger that, ma'am," Miles replied, keeping his eyes on the target and away from the woman he now feared.

Sarah turned to speak to Chuck about the plan, when she saw him struggling to put on his zipline harness. He was fumbling a bit while bent over trying to get the harness around his boots. Despite the fact that they were on a mission and about to attempt a risky plan to rescue Casey, she was still distracted while admiring how the BDUs showed off Chuck's ass…ets while bent over. She was distracted enough that she was a beat too slow in shifting her eyes away when Chuck glanced over at her in the midst of his struggles.

"Sarah…were you just…Did you just check out my butt?" Chuck asked with a surprised, yet somewhat pleased expression. "You did, didn't you? You cheeky little bum-looker you!" Chuck ended, while speaking in a horrible British accent.

A sea of emotions washed quickly across Sarah's face- from hungry appreciation, to embarrassment at being caught, to downright confusion. "Ah, 'bum looker' Chuck?" Sarah responded, thoroughly thrown at the phrase and the terrible accent.

"It's from Saturday Night Live, ma'am," O'Neil interjected, while looking out over the parking lot. "Simon, played by Mike Meyers."

"I don't remember him," Sarah said, although it wasn't too clear which man she was speaking to. "Is he new to the show? I don't think we've seen him this season, have we Chuck?"

"It was from the 90s, ma'am," Miles offered, trying to get on Sarah's good side-or at least off of her hit list. The hard glance she sent his way was a sign that he wasn't there yet.

Sarah felt a twinge of embarrassment, as she often did when her desperate lack of pop culture knowledge came up. It was such a contrast to Chuck's excessive knowledge of pop culture. Being a nerd, knowing pop culture was par for the course. In this case, however, the pop culture reference was such that a non-nerd SEAL trooper had been able to identify the reference immediately.

"Well, Carmichael. You, and your cheeky little bum, need to get ready to go for a ride on the zipline. The idea is to move fast and silently, so that we can get inside the shop quickly and grab the leader before he is able to get downstairs."

* * *

Shaw glanced into the OO from the outside. The recoilless rifle round had made a mess of the interior when it knocked the window inside, but most of the energy from the blast had still be absorbed by the window itself. Which was good. He needed to be able to get to the freezer to get down into Castle itself. He had spent a lot of time plotting and planning this attack, and he was within reach of his goal-the Castle computer systems database. He would be able to access all of the data held by the various US intelligence agencies that could be used to blackmail foreign heads of state and US politicians as well.

The Ring was looking for a power grab. Shaw was looking to burn the CIA to the ground. Once the secrets locked within Castle's computers were unleashed, the US would be a pariah and the blame would fall on the CIA. The organization that he had dedicated himself to had chosen to murder his wife. Shaw would make sure that they paid the price for that treachery.

He just had to get down to Castle. This would have been so much easier if those idiots had waited until Casey went to the BuyMore. No, these guns for hire figure they are unbeatable, so why not challenge the best. Three dead bodies… _well, four including the one I shot_ …say otherwise.

This was going to seriously complicate Phase II of Shaw's plan. The destruction of Sarah Walker, the vessel that Langston Graham used to kill his beloved Evelyn. Y _es, she was simply a vessel used by Graham, but she was a willing vessel. It was her finger that pulled the trigger that ended Eve's life and my future._

In the course of directing CIA operations against The Ring, Shaw had some interaction with Team Bartowski. Shaw had spent enough time with the Team to know that killing Sarah would destroy Chuck Bartowski. To a degree, he respected the younger man. He was inherently good, brave when necessary, and always trying to do the right thing. But Shaw's revenge would not be complete without the destruction of Sarah Walker. He knew that Bartowski would suffer from nightmares, he certainly did. But there was no other way. His revenge was more important than Chuck Bartowski's peace of mind. Nothing was more important to Shaw than revenge. And his hour was finally at hand.

Unaware of that his bad day was about to get far worse, Shaw ran from vehicle to vehicle as he approached the entrance to the OO. He was so close to getting to the database, but knew that geographically close and gaining access close were two different beasts. And to gain access meant getting past John Casey. _If those damned overconfident idiots had waited until John Casey had left to start his shift at the BuyMore, none of this would have been necessary._

As he moved up to the mangled front door of the OO, Shaw pulled a grenade that he had liberated from the Ring soldier he had killed. Tossing the grenade through the hole where the picture window had once been, Shaw ducked for cover. After the grenade bounced off the register and down behind the counter, it detonated, rupturing the containers housing the frozen yogurt which then flooded into the store. Shaw hurdled through the window opening, not concerned with the mess but disappointed with the lack of any sign that Casey had been killed or at least injured.

What he did find angered him even more. The grenade had not just destroyed the frozen yogurt vats, it has also cooked off in the one spot where the shrapnel could hit the freezers. Shaw glared at the mangled remains of the retinal scanner, as though its destruction hadn't been of his own creation. He knew that he wouldn't have time to override the system, get past Casey and get the CIA server data before an NSA cleaner unit, likely disguised as a local SWAT team, would storm the NSA/CIA substation.

* * *

The SEALs in Delta squad ghosted through the BuyMore loading bay, slipping past the Cage and into the hallway leading towards the employee lounge. As they approached the double green doors that opened to the manager's office, Wenzel pulled a fiberoptic endoscope from his cargo pocket and patched the signal into the heads up displays (HUDs) built into the squad helmets. With a quick command, he toggled back and forth between hi-def and infra-red. Using the images, the squad was quickly able to pinpoint the location of each Ring mercenary inside of the store, each member identifying his initial target and memorizing the locations for the secondary target.

Up on the roof of the BuyMore, Jimenez set up his position above the store's main entrance. He unpacked his McMillan Tac 50 sniper rifle from the special case he used for parachute drops. In training he had qualified in shots nearly one mile in distance. Between the optical scope and supporting tactical computer, he could calculate atmospheric conditions, cross-winds, even the earth's rotation. None of that would be needed on this op. With just under 100 yards to the opposition, he could practically make the shots over iron sights in his sleep.

He scanned the threat area for the recoilless rifle, and was surprised find it on the ground next to a dead mercenary. His smile grew wicked as he realized that the weapon had been left on the satchel containing the remaining ammunition for it. That would make disposing of the recoilless rifle easy. He reached into the cargo pocket on his right leg and pulled out a container filled with .50 caliber rounds that he had hand loaded himself. He selected a round with an explosive tip and magnesium core. Just as he was sliding the round into the breach of his rifle, he heard Mancuso whisper into the earpiece.

"Alpha, Bravo, Charlie. Comm check."

"Alpha, go," Jimenez heard quietly spoken from the SEAL a few feet down to his left.

"Bravo, go." Although the only people on the roof with the SEALs were the other SEALs, they were responding in the same whisper that Mancuso had spoken.

"Charlie, go."

"Roger that. Jimmy?" Mancuso responded.

Also speaking in a hushed tone, Jimenez called out, "Green light."

Mancuso paused for a moment. His team was used to the routine, knowing Mancuso was making one last run down his mental checklist. "In five," he said.

Jimenez silently did a five second countdown, his finger tensing on the trigger as his internal clock moved towards zero. Right as Jimenez got to zero, all of the earpieces for the SEAL team could hear Mancuso's "Execute."

The loud report from the sniper rifle was almost instantly drowned out by the sound of the chain reaction explosion of the recoilless rifle ammunition as the white hot magnesium slug lanced through the pack. Before the chunks of asphalt from the four foot deep crater created in the middle of the Buy More Plaza parking lot started to fall onto the roof of the BuyMore and adjacent buildings, the SEALs in Alpha, Bravo and Charlie teams opened up with their silenced Sig Sauer 516 assault rifles on the mercenaries in the parking lot below.

It was hardly a fair fight. The mercenaries had been oblivious to the presence of the SEALs, and had barely processed the sound of the .50 caliber rifle before the explosion in their midst. Several were killed by the shrapnel and blast wave from the explosion. Another was killed when the minibus they had ridden in was flipped over by the blast, the battered vehicle landing on top of the Ring soldier of fortune. Out of the remaining mercenaries, only two survived the onslaught of fire from Alpha, Bravo and Charlie teams. The only reason for their survival was that they had been underneath sedans when the firefight broke out. That protected them from the hail of lead from the BuyMore roof, but also prevented them from being able to return fire-if they could have figured out where the silenced gunners were shooting from. As it was, neither of these men was a true Believer, and neither was willing to die for the mission.

Inside the BuyMore, using information from Agent Carmichael-while amazed at how he had known off of the top of his head the override code for the Burbank BuyMore tv wall (and silently agreeing that while Van Halen's OU812 was a good album, Fair Warning was far better), Wenzel had every tv on the wall start playing Must Love Dogs at full volume. Despite their combat training backgrounds, the Ring mercenaries were each distracted by the sights and sounds of barking dogs. The SEALs in Delta squad leapt out from behind the Guitar Hero display, their suppressed assault rifles tracking to the spot of their assigned targets. Before the mercenaries were aware of the threat, each man had dropped like a marionette with its' strings cut.

The mercenaries had been arranged in a circle surrounding the Nerd Herd desk, with the Nerd Herders trapped inside the circular desk, while the green shirts were huddled behind the counter for the cash registers. Before the Buy Morons knew what was happening, the intimidating guys with guns who had only spoken in grunts were down and a second group of men quickly moved up from the back of the store, silenced rifles tracking for any additional threats, their bodies in black, white and grey camouflage, with balaclavas covering their faces and goggles over their eyes. The new group quickly but silently moved through the aisles up to the Nerd Herd desk.

Ignoring the shocked civilians, each SEAL grabbed the body of the mercenary he had targeted, hauled them up in a fireman's carry and hustled out of the store to the back loading bay. The Ring mercenaries had been kind enough to leave their SUV unlocked next to the loading dock. Dumping the bodies in the back, the SEALs watched as their teammate Moudy quickly hotwired the SUV, impressed as always at the skillset that he had always been vague about acquiring. As the talent had saved their lives on more than one occasion, they were content with giving him a hard time while not disclosing his ability to the powers that be. As Moudy drove off with the bodies of the Ring troops, Mancuso and the remaining members of Delta squad re-entered the store, moving to the shattered front doors, taking up positions to storm Castle should the need arise.

Inside the store, Morgan stood with his jaw open having witnessed a take-down far more masterful than any he had pulled off in Call of Duty, by mystery troops who never spoke and were acting as though the BuyMore employees were not even there. Beside him, Lester kept tapping Jeff's arm saying, "What just happened here? Jeff? Jeffrey, what just happened?" Barnes ignored Lester, banging his hands to each side of his head, while saying over and over, "What did I take this morning? Why can't I remember so I can get more?"

"Jeffrey, focus. Morgan and I saw that too," Lester puffed out, thoroughly lost over what had been going on in his store.

"That stuff was so good it got you and Morgan to see it too? Man, I've got to remember what it was," Jeff slurred out as he slapped the side of his head in an effort to recall what he was under the influence of at the moment.

"You don't even remember what you took. How do you expect to get more? Wait, wait. What am I saying? This isn't another one of your pharmaceutical fantasies, Jeffrey. Sometimes I wonder why I even bother with you."

"Cause no one else will do Bennie's happy hours with you?"

"Mmh. Fair point my friend," Lester conceded.

Morgan chimed in again, "Uh, guys? Can we focus on the fact that a bunch of yahoos with guns took over the BuyMore, and a second group of guys with guns just shot all of them and hauled them away?"

"Not now Morgan," Lester snapped. "Can't you see that Jefferson and I are talking here?"

Meanwhile, Big Mike, deciding that whatever the situation was that had just happened was over, opted to get back to his office to eat a bearclaw or two. He needed to calm himself before phoning corporate to advise them of the damage to the store and absence of customers, while hoping that they wouldn't think he had gone crazy with his description of the events.

* * *

A/N2: One of the SEALs in this chapter is named after an actual CIA officer who was killed in the line of duty in 2003. In 2009, then Director Leon Panetta publicly recognized his service.


	9. Chapter 9

A/N Thanks again to the reviewers. I definitely appreciate all the support, as well as the requests/constructive criticism. We've now gotten to the second half of the Battle for BuyMoria, which means confronting Shaw (guess it's not a spoiler now to point out that he's the bad guy?). I've combined the next two chapters into one, which means that (barring any more major revisions-or inspirations from reviewers) that there will be two lengthy chapters and one lengthier epilogue to go. Enjoy.

I don't own Chuck. Or gummy bears (it'll make sense later).

Ch. 10 Chuck versus the Magnet

Standing on the roofs of Underpants, Etc., Chuck looked down at the Reaper control to his wrist computer. He then fed the main video feed to the heads up display on the SEAL team helmets. As neither he nor Sarah had such a helmet, the two of them monitored the video feed from Chuck's wrist computer. It was readily apparent that the Ring soldiers had not anticipated the loss of communications as they were still in disarray from the EMP pulse.

Just as Sarah said, "There goes our guy" as Shaw jumped through the window into the OO, the Reaper video signal went dark. Chuck started quickly typing away at his computer. "The Reaper has been shut down," he said while frowning at the information on the small screen strapped to his wrist. "I can override it, but it will take me a few minutes."

Sarah simply shook her head. "We move forward with the plan. We zip down to the Orange Orange roof and capture or kill whoever just went into my shop. The Reaper surveillance would be nice, but it is not necessary at this stage of the operation. Trust me, once this is over I'll be finding out who shut down our eyes in the sky and it won't be a pleasant conversation. There aren't many people with the access to remotely shut down that bird. I'll find who did this to us."

Through their ear buds, they heard Mancuso give the heads up and then the attack command. An instant later, they heard the .50 incendiary round from the sniper rifle detonate the Ring recoilless rifle ammunition. After the explosion, they could hear the sounds of the rounds being fired by the SEAL teams striking the vehicles near the remaining Ring troops, but no sound from the silenced weapons or from the highly trained specwar operators.

Unsure of whether the mercenaries were actually dead or were just playing possum, O'Neil rode the zipline down to the roof of the OO. He skirted to the edge of the building until he was in position to provide cover fire once Sarah and Chuck made their entrance into the store. Despite Chuck's enhanced skills with the Intersect 2.0, Sarah was still uncomfortable with the fact that he would be alone during his zipline over the parking lot of the Plaza. He would be by himself as he went through the heart of what was, for all intents and purposes, a combat zone.

Sarah stepped to the side to allow Chuck to get to the edge of the roof and grab the zipline. Just as he looped the handle over the piton rope, Chuck happened to glance down. "Oh crap," he murmured, although it was still loud enough for Sarah to hear him. "So high. This roof has got to be way higher than the BuyMore roof."

"You did the jump from the BuyMore roof for me, Chuck. Now you need to do this for Casey," Sarah told him in a calm, confident voice. For a moment, Sarah was utterly distracted by a wayward mental image of Chuck dressed as an Olympic high diver atop a 10 meter platform. After making a mental note to buy Chuck a speedo when this was all said and done, Sarah refocused on the mission at hand. "Besides, this should be a piece of cake after jumping out of an aircraft from 30,000 feet."

"Right. Casey. We've got to get down there and save Casey," Chuck said with slightly more confidence. Sarah could see Chuck psyching himself up, working to overcome his fear of heights in order to save his friend. Although he was working hard at not spiraling out of control, one of his knees slightly buckled as he stepped to the very edge. That little wobble let Sarah know that, despite the capabilities of the Intersect 2.0, her Chuck was still in there. The Intersect 2.0 was still dependent on Chuck's emotional state to function properly, and Chuck's fear of heights made him plenty emotional. Then again, his fall from the Grand Embassador balcony strapped to a chair with Casey while trying to save Sugar Bear's girlfriend probably didn't help. Nor did his Tarzan impersonation to save her from Sasha Banichek. Or when he tried to use the zipline at the training facility in Prague… _hmm, best not to think about Prague_.

Sarah watched as Chuck's attention shifted to the zipline. She saw the momentary shift in Chuck's posture as the flash showed Chuck exactly what he needed to do. While Casey was an excellent partner, Sarah doubted that he would be able to pick up that slight tell from Chuck. Sarah was becoming an expert on all things Chuck, although there were so many more details to learn. Hopefully she would one day learn them all- maybe after fifty years or so of close study. _Focus on the mission, Walker._

Sarah shifted her attention from Chuck to the parking lot below. She brought the MP5 submachine gun up to her shoulder as Chuck launched himself down the line. She let out a relieved sigh when Chuck landed on the OO roof with no sign of movement from the Ring mercenaries. She swung the sling for the MP5 over her head and shifted the gun to her back as she threw her own zipline handle over the cord and quickly followed after Chuck. The thought that he was down near the enemy while she was beyond arm's reach turned out to be more unnerving than watching him zipline down in the first place.

After landing on the roof, she reached into the backpack she was carrying to withdraw two coils of rope, which she secured to different points on the air handler housing. Playing out the rope, she made her way over to the edge where Chuck and O'Neil were peeking out from over top of the mangled front door. She dropped one coil at Chuck's feet, while dropping the second a couple feet to his left.

While the zip lining had been nerve-wracking for her (at least when Chuck had been apart from her), the next stage in their assault was downright terrifying. Again, it was not fear for her own safety, but the degree to which Chuck would be exposed to danger. The plan called for the two of them to repel into the store through the opening in the front picture window. With the Reaper offline, they were going in blind with a known hostile somewhere on the inside.

Sarah and Chuck lined up shoulder to shoulder on the lip of the roof, facing back over the shop's roof. On her three count, they pushed off and swung their bodies through the open window and into the yogurt shop. The good news was that they hadn't been shot at by the Ring mercenaries while repelling. The bad news was that Murphy's Law decided to make its presence known.

As Sarah swung through the window, she came face to face with the electrical wire that had been swaying back and forth since before Casey retreated down into Castle. Letting go of the rope and twisting her body to avoid being electrocuted, Sarah was off balance as she landed on the floor. The spot she landed on was covered in melted yogurt, which made a difficult, unbalanced landing impossible. The sound of her crashing to the ground and getting the wind knocked out of her was enough to draw Chuck's attention to her, and away from the threat inside the shop.

Chuck had landed smoothly, and quickly drawn his tranq gun, but just as quickly was distracted by his concern that Sarah had been hurt. He had started to see some movement from behind the counter, but couldn't tear his eyes away from Sarah as he had to be sure that she was ok.

"Still not willing to use a real gun, huh Chuck?"

"Shaw," Chuck exclaims, stunned at the identity of the leader of the Ring attack. "Daniel, it doesn't have to be like this."

"Take a look around Chuck. This is real life. Not everybody gets the fairytale ending-in fact most people don't. After what they did to my Eve, no one in the CIA deserves a happy ending. Especially not Sarah Walker, not after she killed my wife. You get to watch her die Chuck. Maybe you will be like me and every time you go to sleep you will see the image of her dying over and over again."

"Now, drop the toy gun and hands out at your side. With the retinal scanner out of commission, I'm going to need you to override the system so that I can get into Castle. Shame you boasted to me about having read the manual from cover to cover, isn't it."

Even with his enhanced skills from the Intersect, Chuck had been so concerned when he heard Sarah slam into the floor during their breach into the Orange Orange that Shaw had been able to get close enough to Chuck that Shaw was able to use his left hand to knock the tranquilizer gun out of Chuck's hand. Shaw quickly followed that blow with a punch to Chuck's stomach that left him winded and doubled over. Through his pain, Chuck was able to pivot on his left foot and swing backwards with his right arm, driving his elbow into Shaw's nose.

Despite his nonviolent nature, Chuck was secretly thrilled to hear the crack that signaled Shaw's nose shattering. Shaw's face being a bloody mess didn't stop him from swiping the back of Chuck's knees sending him to the floor. Shaw followed the kick with a right cross to the back of Chuck's head, causing Chuck to flop to the ground with his hands splayed out to the sides. Chuck then quickly snatched up the object that had been on the floor next to where his right hand landed. From his prone position on the floor, he threw it at Shaw, striking him in the forehead.

"I've been trained in fifteen different martial arts styles, and none of them recommended using a gummy bear as a weapon," Shaw said derisively.

"That's because its a condiment, not a weapon," Chuck responded with a shrug. "You could even call it a magnet."

Shaw's eyes went wide as he started to turn to look at the floor behind him where Sarah had lain immobile since swinging through the window. Only she wasn't lying on the floor unconscious from electrocution as he had thought.

"Looks like you don't get your happy ending either Shaw," Sarah said as she fired twice into Shaw's back, her Smith & Wesson shining in the strobe lighting within the shop. As Shaw lay motionless face down on the floor, Sarah looked at Chuck to make sure that he wasn't hurt. She saw Chuck with a stunned expression, his eyes tracking back and forth between Shaw and the gun in her hand still pointed at the body lying on the floor.

At first, Sarah was confused over the shock and fear in Chuck's expression. Her eyes then narrowed and the blue color became like ice as she realized that Chuck was thinking back to her shooting Lt. Mauser in the Christmas tree lot not far from where they were currently standing. Back then Sarah had willingly committed murder to protect Chuck, only learning later that he had seen the whole thing-seen, but had not heard the threats that Mauser had made towards Chuck and his family. She had known without a doubt that killing the surrendering Mauser was the only way to keep Chuck, Ellie and Devon safe.

Sarah had willingly sacrificed a piece of her soul when she had pulled the trigger on Mauser. She had sacrificed other pieces of her soul in earlier, similar although less worthy, justifications during her career with the CIA and even during her cons with her father Jack. Despite believing that she was not an inherently good enough person to be worthy of a man such as Chuck, she had, without hesitation, embraced evil in order to protect Chuck, Ellie and Awesome.

Before the shooting of Mauser Sarah had told Chuck that she would do whatever it took to make sure that he was protected. Yet when he saw her doing what had to be done to keep him and his loved ones safe, he had freaked out and pushed her away. It had hurt her then, and still rankled her. She had acknowledged to herself that it would have been better for her to have told him the truth straight out, instead of the white lie that she had thought would protect Chuck's naivete, and try to keep Chuck from realizing that he was falling for the CIA's most effective assassin.

Even now she feared, in that dark corner of her mind, that one day the inherent goodness in Chuck-the trait that had convinced Bryce that Chuck was the only person who was both capable of handling the Intersect and decent enough not to be corrupted by access to such power-would make him realize that her sins from her childhood magnified by the horrors she had perpetrated as a CIA operative made her unworthy of the love of such a man.

For the moment, however, her frustration with Chuck overwhelmed her self-doubt, "He's not dead! He was wearing a vest. Even without the Intersect you should have been able to spot that."

"A…a vest?" Chuck questioned in a quavering voice as he stared at the inert body lying at his feet.

"Yes, a vest," Sarah ground out between clenched teeth. _For a scary smart guy, Chuck can certainly be a complete idiot at times._ She holstered her trusty Smith & Wesson while simultaneously pulling out her tranq gun. She proceeded to shoot Shaw in the ass so that he would stay unconscious for the next fifteen to twenty minutes. She tilted her head to the side as she contemplated the gun in her hand. Before working with Chuck, she had rarely used tranquilizers, except for those times when she would slip a little something into the drink of a mark. Back then, whenever she drew a gun the person on the other end wound up dead. Now she never headed out on a mission without carrying a tranq gun.

Straightening up, she looked down at Shaw and shot him twice more in his butt for good measure. She then secured his hands and feet with zip ties, while putting his boots, belt, watch and all items from his pockets into a bag to be thoroughly examined by an NSA tech. She wanted to be sure that he didn't have any knives or toys that could help him try to escape.

"Three darts, Agent Walker," Chuck questioned with a glimmer in his eye.

"He used to smirk- a lot," Sarah replied with a one armed shrug. "And I hate smirkers."

Struggling to keep a straight face (honestly, was there anyone who had liked Shaw-besides Shaw himself?), Chuck nodded, "Duly noted."

As Sarah and Chuck walked back to the freezers and door to Castle, Sarah reached behind her back, snapping out her tranq gun and shot again without looking back, the dart striking Shaw right between the eyes.

"How do you do that?" Chuck asked with a lot of respect, and not a little bit of fear. _Note to self: never get on Sarah's bad side_.


	10. Chapter 10

A/N: We are in the home stretch of the story. This chapter, another full chapter and an epilogue left to go. Work is going to get crazy next week, so I'm trying to do a push to get the last parts up before then- although there are some significant revisions going on with the next chapter as I type this. While there is still some action ahead, the story starts to focus more on Chuck and Sarah. I'm not sure it qualifies as fluff, but it's as close as I can get (and the epilogue will be particularly fluffy).

Thanks again to all the reviewers.

Chapter 11: Chuck versus the Cover Story

As Chuck made his way to the freezer, walking daintily to try to avoid the larger puddles of melted frozen yogurt, he thought about Sarah's response to his reaction to the shooting of Shaw. He had been stunned, and in a dark corner of his mind his conscious mocked that he had secretly been thrilled at seeing Shaw shot. He also admitted to himself that he had flashed back to the Mauser shooting.

While intellectually he had accepted that the only way for Sarah to keep him, Ellie, Devon and Morgan safe from Fulcrum was for her to eliminate Mauser, emotionally he was still conflicted over the shooting of a man who was in the process of surrendering. He had always thought of the bad guy surrendering in terms of black and white-they stop fighting, the good guys don't hurt the bad guys any more.

And while Sarah was unquestionably one of the good guys, the best of the best in fact ( _not that he was biased_ ), he occasionally had trouble remembering that she saw the entire world in terms of shades of grey. He acknowledged that the only way for him and his family to truly be safe from the very real threat of Mauser was for him to be eliminated. For Sarah that had been the only factor to her equation of keep or kill him.

He was also embarrassed by his reaction at the time to Sarah lying to him about Mauser going to prison. He had lost some of his naïveté after spending a couple of years in the spy world. He realized that not only was it ingrained in Sarah as a spy to withhold certain information, he also realized that Sarah had been trying to protect him by lying to him. At the time of the shooting, he hadn't been at a spot where he would have been able to accept the truth about why she had done what she had to do. She was trying to protect the innocence that he still carried with him.

Chuck also knew that Sarah was conflicted by many things that she had been called upon to do by the Agency. He had avoided deliberately flashing on her past missions, although some (like Alana Trufeau) can through anyway. It pained him to think that she had to perform such a deed on his behalf. From time to time, her concern that she wasn't a good person leaked through the hard shell that she projected to the world, and it physically hurt him to think that he had contributed to her (misguided) belief by the fact that her mission to protect him had forced her to kill an unarmed, surrendering enemy agent. The fact that she was willing to sacrifice of herself was proof that she was an inherently good person. Maybe not always as kind as he was, but inherently good.

He sensed that she felt that Chuck had put her up on some pedestal that she didn't deserve, but the truth was, she was already up on the pedestal when Chuck happened along. She had pulled herself up on that pedestal through hard work, bravery, intelligence and dedication. The very fact that she didn't feel worthy of being on the pedestal was proof to Chuck that she belonged up there.

He also knew that it wasn't just the casual application of violence that had scarred her emotionally. As he got to know her better, to pick up on her tells, he realized that when she had to seduce a mark or use lethal force, there would be a moment when those incredible blue eyes would cloud over with pain. It would only last a moment before the agent mask would fall back into place, and her emotions would be locked away. To Chuck, that moment of a window into her emotions was proof that she wasn't the Ice Queen, but rather an incredible human being who had risked her life on countless occasions and put the safety of the country before all else.

And then there were the lies. The childhood as the daughter of a conman, combined with CIA training and experience as a field agent meant that lying was pretty much ingrained into Sarah's DNA. But that DNA was changing-mutating if you will-as Chuck could see the tension in Sarah's face when she would have to lie to Ellie in order to protect the cover or keep Ellie safe. Chuck liked to believe that being around such open and honest people like Ellie, Devon and Morgan was rubbing off on her.

Chuck no longer counted himself in the group of "open and honest" people. Since the formation of Team Bartowski, the lies had come quicker, smoother. He still hated lying, but the words would now come out without hesitation. It was not the man he wanted to be.

What kept Chuck awake at night (at least those night when Sarah didn't sleep over) wasn't the killings, seductions or lies, it was the knowledge that on hundreds of occasions she had cheated death before coming to Burbank. If she hadn't killed the bad guy, or wound up a mark with seduction and lies to the point he didn't know which way was up, she could have easily been killed. He realized that there had been so many occasions when her life could have easily been ended, and that he never would have had the chance to meet this incredible person. That was what made him wake up in a cold sweat at nights, more so when she wasn't staying over on a "cover" date.

* * *

Chuck cut short his musings on Sarah and focused on the access panel next to the damaged retinal scanner. Opening the panel, Chuck spliced an auxiliary power module back together, restoring back up power to Castle. Using his wrist computer, Chuck was able to open the door to Castle bypassing the retinal scanner. With a puff of air, the sealed door opened up, revealing a dark opening with emergency lights creating a haunted appearance to the main bay in Castle.

Sarah shot out an arm, blocking Chuck from stepping out onto the stairs leading down into Castle. There was no sign that the Ring had penetrated Castle's defenses, and Shaw's presence in the OO supported that belief, but Sarah also knew how Casey would react to an attack on his base. Chuck was thinking like a friend, concerned for Casey's well-being. While she loved that about Chuck, she was in mission mode and knew that Casey would be as well.

"We need to contact Casey before we just stroll in there," Sarah said to Chuck, not attempting to keep her voice quiet. "I'm sure he's got some surprises set up for any hostiles that might try to breach Castle." Sarah opened the door all the way, sweeping her gun out in front of her to make sure there were no Ring agents on the stairwell.

Before setting foot into Castle, Sarah called out loudly, "Casey, you secure?"

"Roger that," came the response, in Casey's gruff voice. "Authentication?"

"Morning glory," Sarah replied, knowing that Casey was just following protocol but still slightly disgruntled that he would believe there was even the possibility that she could be captured.

"Dammit, this was just about to get interesting. I'm guessing the nerd is with you?"

Sarah led the way down the stairs, with Chuck cautiously walking behind her. "Interesting? Seriously Casey? You've got the stairwell booby-trapped with anti-personnel land mines, a six barreled machine gun trained on the door, the world's biggest handgun strapped to one leg and your usual Sig strapped to the other leg, a baker's dozen hand grenades on your combat vest, and…What is that? Is that really…A microwave and a week's supply of hot pockets? A well rounded arsenal, but your rations lack any nutritional value. That is just not healthy my friend."

The sneer on Casey's face intensified at the slight of his food choice, "Hey, have you and Beckman been talking?"

As Casey and Sarah set to dismantling the booby traps and securing the weapons back into Castle's Armory, Chuck headed over to the computer terminal. As she watched Chuck power up the computer and re-establish the secure link to the outside world, Sarah knew that the Piranha was about to go to work and track down whoever it was that had shut down the Reaper drone. To be able to do that discretely meant someone very high placed, but Sarah had complete confidence that her boyfriend/elite hacker was going to find that mole. She just hoped that she would get the chance to exact some justice-or just plain old fashioned revenge. She was good either way.

As she and Casey entered the main room to Castle after securing "Betty" (with much bellyaching from Casey about still not having the chance to use her in an op), she heard Chuck on a link with Beckman revealing who the mole was that tried to ruin their rescue attempt. As Beckman begrudgingly congratulated Chuck on his skills at penetrating the supposedly impenetrable NSA systems, Casey turned to Walker with a confused look.

"What was that about?" he quietly asked.

"New development. Turns out Chuck has even more skills than we knew," Sarah responded with pride ringing through her voice.

"I don't want to know about any 'skills' Bartowski may have that you learned about," Casey said with a grimace.

"Get your mind out of the gutter," Sarah snarled, touchy as always at any slight directed towards Chuck, which provided an endless source of amusement for Casey. "When Castle went offline, so did all the recon satellites we have aloft that could have provided realtime images of the Plaza. As it happens, Chuck used to be a world famous hacker who managed to break into a Russian satellite to see what we were up against."

"I don't want to hear that any part of our victory here was due to the commies," Casey growled.

"Relax. If it makes you feel better, Chuck did it without their permission or knowledge. And he fried a North Korean satellite in the process while tricking the Russians into thinking it was the North Koreans who had hijacked the satellite."

A single grunt was the only reply she received, but, like Chuck, Sarah was now well versed in Casey's grunt language and correctly interpreted the grunt as "well, that's ok then but

I'm not going to thank Chuck for using commie tech to help out the mission."

* * *

Chuck and Casey had to enter the Buy More through the loading dock, as construction was still underway to repair the damage to the front of the store following the Ring attack. Big Mike had called all the employees in to make sure that all the product and displays were ready for the grand re-opening. Closing the store for several days meant that even the usual sluggish sales income wasn't there, and Big Mike worried about corporate shutting them down. He dreaded the thought of getting transferred to the Beverly Hills store and being forced to work as a green shirt under their store manager Barkley.

"A mix up on the location for filming an action movie scene? Is that seriously the best the brain trust at the NSA could think up? There's no way that anyone…could…" Chuck tapered off as Lester sidled up to them, attempting (and failing miserably) to be discreet.

"Did you hear Charles? Word is that some big-shot Hollywood director screwed up and trashed the Orange Orange and half the BuyMore Plaza by mistake! This could be the big break for Jeffster if we make it on the big screen. Jeffrey's trying to find out which studio was behind it so that he can 'acquire' the footage. Or at least that's why he said he was heading to his office to search on his computer. Come to think of it, I'd better make sure what 'footage' he's looking at. Big Mike is on the warpath and Jeffster isn't bring in enough cash for us to be able to afford to ditch the day jobs."

As Lester hustled off in the direction of the employee bathroom to get Jeff in his "office" stall, Casey turned to Chuck with a smirk, "You were saying, numb nuts?" He then stomped off in the direction of the grills to make sure that his beloved Beastmasters weren't damaged in the attack.

"I'm just saying, a mix up over what fast food store was slated for demolition sounds pretty thin, to anyone with a lesser degree of paranoia than Jeff and Lester. In other words, the rest of humanity may not particularly believe the excuse. I mean there are bullet holes in the BuyMore!"

"Chuck, my man," Morgan came scurrying over. "All these years of living in Southern California and I had no idea, none, how realistic movie sets were. When those FBI guys came down from the roof and started shooting the bad guys inside the BuyMore I needed to change my shorts 'cause I thought it was real bullets. This is great though, the BuyMore gets a facelift and we get paid to not work. Well, we didn't really work much as it was, but now I don't even have to use my work avoidance skills. I just get to sit around and rake in the money. At least I would if we were actually making money."

"You really buying that line about some movie studio screw up?" Casey interjected, shocking Chuck by threatening to expose what really happened. "I heard Barnes saying that the guys with the guns were goons hired by Large Mart to take down the OO because it was cutting into the profits from the Large Mart food court," Casey said out of the side of his mouth to Morgan, while conspicuously scanning the store as though some random person might be listening in on a conversation in a temporarily closed retail electronics store.

"Whoa," Morgan's eyes grew huge. "Seriously, you think it was actually Large Mart? Man, I've got to find out what Jeff knows." That said, Morgan ran off in the direction of the employee bathroom.

"What just happened here?"

"Relax, moron. Barnes won't remember not saying something. He rarely remembers what he actually does say. Now all of the BuyMorons will be chasing their tails, debating between a movie studio screw up and corporate greed. Nobody will bother trying to figure out the truth."

As Casey started to inspect possible damage, frowning as he looked closer at a scuff mark. "Casey, what is up with you and the Beastmasters? I mean, it's a grill."

"It's not just a grill. It's a top of the line grill, made in America, sold in America to Americans to make all American food like burgers and steaks. What's not to be proud of with something like that?" Casey responded with a hard glint at Chuck, who started to appreciate just how dedicated Casey was to his cover job.

Just then Fernando ran up to Chuck, "Chuck, man, have you heard? It may not have been a movie scene. I heard that Large Mart tried to shut down the OO. It is true?"

Casey walked away with a very satisfied smirk on his face as Chuck looked at his co-worker and tried to wrap his head around the insanity that was parading as reality within the confines of the BuyMore. He opened and closed his mouth several times as he tried to come up with a response to Fernando that would keep the ludicrous covers in place while not demeaning his co-worker. He was saved from his dilemma by the sound of a very familiar, very welcome voice from just behind him.

"Hi, mind if I borrow my boyfriend for a moment or two? Thanks!" Sarah shot a full wattage smile at Fernando, who, like the rest of the BuyMore employees, was stunned anytime Sarah spoke directly to them. It was now Fernando's turn to have his mouth silently open and close with nary a sound being heard beyond a whispered "meep". Taking that as his consent, Sarah pulled Chuck by his arm in the direction of the home theatre room.

It was a statement to Sarah's universal appeal that absolutely no one even thought to wonder why she was inside an electronics store that was closed for remodeling due to the "incident" that had completely destroyed the portion of her shop that the general public knew about. Even Big Mike was so accustomed to her presence in the store that when he saw her talking to Chuck off to the side, he just shook his head and muttered, "Lucky bastard" before heading off to have his third glazed bear claw of the morning.

"You know that it's hardly fair to turn the full Sarah Walker charm on poor Fernando. You know how overwhelming that is for everybody."

"Everybody, Chuck? Are you including yourself in that group?" Sarah replied with a laugh.

"Most definitely," Chuck responded while performing the Bartowski Eyebrow Dance (patent pending).

Sarah gave Chuck a PDA kiss that was for far more than the cover. It was a testament to Chuck's growing spy skills that he didn't jump through the roof when her right hand slid down out of the view of the surveillance cameras and gave his right cheek a little squeeze. She laughed at how he twitched, trying to control his natural impulse. She laughed harder at his shocked expression, although she wasn't sure if he was embarrassed at potentially being seen by surveillance or by his co-workers.

"So, Chuck, we have a briefing from Beckman on a new mission."

"How are we supposed to run an op while Castle is being renovated?" Chuck griped. " Can't Beckman give us a break? I mean we just put down a full scale attack on the base."

"Well, we'll just have to see what she has in store for us," Sarah responded as she slid her arm through his and led him out of the store towards the back of Orange Orange.

Fifteen minutes later, Morgan approached Casey inside the store. "Hey, big guy. Have you seen Chuck? I've been looking for him everywhere. Any idea where he could be?"

"Probably rounding third," Casey grumbled as he watched the NSA cleaner team restore to the BuyMore to its former glory, or at least back to its former condition. "Enough questions, I need to go find some brain bleach."

A/N 2: My apologies to baldcoder for the bit in the armory, but don't give up hope!


	11. Chapter 11

A/N: I am supposed to be working right now, but instead wanted to get this out. Last chapter before the epilogue. I hope you enjoy it.

Ch. 12: Chuck versus Beckman's Master Plan

Chuck, Sarah and Casey were assembled in their usual positions around the conference table in the main room of Castle, their attention to the large monitor before them. Chuck was always amazed at how General Beckman, for such a tiny woman, was able to look down at them through the monitor.

"Ma'am," Casey started, "I understand you have a new mission for us?"

"Yes, Colonel," Beckman agreed, looking at each member of the assembled team. "First, I will need you to return to Ft. Meade in order to assist with dealing with the mole who shut down the Reaper that was tasked to assist in the attack on the Ring mercenaries. Thanks to Mr. Bartowski's information, we have identified Clyde Decker as the mole. As you are aware Colonel, Decker is well connected and very dangerous. You need to be cautious on this mission."

"Mr. Bartowski, you will be assisting Colonel Casey," Beckman continued, remaining impassive when she saw Walker bristle at the mention of Chuck being away with Casey but not her. "However," she continued, "you will remain in Los Angeles in this tech support capacity."

"Colonel Casey, you are dismissed. There is a plane at Andrews AFB waiting for you to fly back to Pax River. You will need to use an alternate i.d. for this flight. I do not want the Ring getting word of you coming back to headquarters."

With that, Casey nodded to Walker and Bartowski, then went to his locker in Castle to get a clean legend ID and a go back for his flight back East. Sarah and Chuck returned their attention to the monitor.

"Now, having discovered that Shaw and Decker were affiliated with the Ring, it is clear that there need to be safe houses in or around Los Angeles should either Castle, Orange Orange, the BuyMore or Mr. Bartowski's residence in Echo Park come under any future threat. Agent Walker, we have created an account in cryptocurrency for you to convert to untraceable funds in order to acquire three properties to be set up as safe houses in case of any such future emergencies. As far as the United States government, including the NSA and CIA, are concerned, the cryptocurrency account and any properties bought through it do not exist. I do not want any connection between the government and these safe houses."

Sarah's eyes grew wide at the implication of what the General had just said. "No connections, General?" Sarah cast an involuntary glance towards Chuck, who, while attentive to the meeting, appeared to not be picking up on the subtext coming from the General.

"None Agent Walker. There is to be no paper trail. No identification in any report," Beckman continued with a meaningful glance at Sarah. "No monitoring. The only people to know of the existence of these houses will be you, Mr. Bartowski, and Colonel Casey after his return from headquarters."

"Now, it is my understanding that the two of you have a cover date planned with Drs. Bartowski and Woodcomb next weekend. I will have the account information left at the dead drop at your hotel Agent Walker. With the 'remodeling' of the Orange Orange and the BuyMore, the two of you should be able to take some time this coming week to identify and possibly purchase a property before your trip."

With her usual lack of pleasantries, Beckman cut the video feed. Sarah turned to Chuck, a gleam in her eye at this development-a location where she and Chuck would be approved to go to periodically, but where there would be no surveillance of any kind. Chuck, on the other hand, looked stunned. He spun to face Sarah at the mention of "no monitoring", and saw the unrestrained smile she briefly flashed. He was like a child that had just discovered that Santa Claus was real. One look at Sarah's expectant face, and a broad grin burst out on both of their faces.

"Well, Mr. Carmichael, why don't we fire up the computer and start looking at property listings. It's time to go house hunting!"

* * *

Out of the driver's side window, he watched as a seagull rode the wind currents over the gently lapping waves. He thought back to his recent meeting with General Beckman. It wasn't a question of whether she had been withholding information from the briefing, it was a question of what information and how much. He had a reputation in the NSA ranks as an enforcer who did not question orders.

If the NSA had a problem, he got rid of it, permanently. Sometimes the solution was discreet, with the person disappearing as though he or she had never existed. Other times, when a message needed to be sent, the solution was messy and public. This time her problem was Daniel Shaw, who needed to be removed from the black site and disposed of without the Ring learning what information Shaw had revealed while in custody.

His NSA issued black Suburban with heavily tinted windows sped down the road. Between his evasive driving training, the bulletproof windows and doors, the arsenal stashed inside of the SUV, and his marksmanship skills, he was confident that he would be able to withstand anyone foolish enough to challenge him in the urban assault vehicle.

It took him a moment to realize that his confidence was about to be put to the test. The OH-6 helicopter was next to invisible, with its paint scheme black and varying shades of grey and no operating lights. The small helicopter had been flying at its maximum altitude of 10,000 feet when the pilot swooped down near the Suburban as the road switched from suburban sprawl to bisect a state park. With the shrouded tail rotor and composite rotor blades, the helicopter was practically silent in its approach.

The pilot and gunner onboard were well aware of both the capabilities and limitations of the vehicle they were targeting. The sudden flash of taillights revealed the moment the NSA agent spotted the aircraft. The pilot had anticipated the action, dropping the nose while pulling up on the collective as the gunner slid open the rear door and targeted the large SUV. Powering up the electric motor on the minigun, he lined up the sights and pressed the trigger. A tongue of flame lept from the ends of the barrels towards the SUV below.

The manufacturer of the armor plating used in the NSA Suburban guaranteed that it could handle a minimum of 30 7.62 rounds or 20 .50 caliber rounds before bullets would start to leak into the vehicle interior. The gunner on the OH-6 was aware of this information, but with his 7.62 minigun cranking out 3500 rounds per minute it would take a grand total of half a second to exceed those specifications. Added to that was the fact that his ammunition was explosive tipped rounds, which defeated the armor plating sooner than the manufacturer guarantee.

After a ten second burst from the minigun, the passenger compartment of the SUV was completely engulfed in flames. The fuel tank was punctured, the gasoline bursting into a fireball that rose up into the night sky, curling towards the overhead clouds. The pilot swung around to the opposite side of the burning vehicle, now motionless in the middle of the road. The gunner unleashed another ten second burst from his gun into the vehicle, leaving behind a wreck so mangled that police would have a difficult time identifying the make and model from what little was left of the gutted vehicle. The gunner poked his head out of the helicopter to look back at the inferno on the road below, cackling maniacally as the OH-6 disappeared into the night.

* * *

General Beckman looked down at her cellphone, seeing a picture of flaming wreckage. She promptly sent off a text message to a different cellphone, which read "Stage 1 complete. Commence Stage 2." A moment later her computer received a report from John Casey, sent from Castle. A quick check showed that Castle's biometric scanner had verified Casey's access into Castle over an hour earlier. A second check brought up the internal surveillance for Castle, showing Casey currently sitting in the armory, cleaning his sidearm.

The only problem that Beckman had with these confirmations of John Casey being alive and well and working away in Burbank, California was that she knew the confirmations were in fact, lies. Lies that she had arranged. A beep from her cellphone took her attention away from her computer. The new message read, "Stage 3 complete." Shortly after she read the message, that message and her outgoing text message vanished without any trace.

Beckman had to grin at the skill level being displayed. She had no doubt that the telephone company no longer had any record of the text messages ever being sent or received. She was also fully confident that the State Police now had a record of a full investigation into the single vehicle fatal "accident", even though the accident had just occurred. Per her direction, the police investigation concluded that the SUV had crashed while transporting chemicals and equipment for cooking methamphetamines, and the resulting fire had set off numerous firearms being transported as well.

The police report would conclude that due to the intense fire, the identity of the driver could not be determined. However, a trance of the VIN from the SUV showed that it was owned by a known M13 gang leader. Beckman also knew that there would be absolutely no trace of the Suburban as ever belonging to the NSA-no records within the DMV, and more impressively, no records within the NSA. Even the bane of bureaucracy, standard vehicle maintenance records, no longer showed the vehicle as ever having been in the NSA pool.

There had been many occasions in the past where she had unleashed The Casey on some enemy of the nation. This was the first time she had ever unleashed The Casey and The Piranha on someone. As an added bonus, Casey had finally gotten to use his M134 minigun on an operation. Maybe now he wouldn't requisition for use on every single mission. She could have sent the man into a nudist colony, and he would have requested permission to bring that weapon. Beckman wondered what Gertrude Verbanski would think if the NSA were to send Casey off to a nudist colony on a mission. She would likely find the prospect as funny as Beckman did. And Casey thought that his little dalliance with Verbanski was a secret. Didn't the man remember who he worked for?

Clyde Decker had been well connected, and desperately feared within the NSA. Given his senior status, and clearance level, the amount of information he had fed to the Ring would have been invaluable. But it had taken someone with both senior status and a high clearance level to shut down the Reaper drone during the Battle for the BuyMore. He had to know the risk he ran authorizing the shutdown of the Reaper. From what Bartowski had shared with her, Decker had covered his tracks very well-but not well enough to outfox the Piranha.

Officially, Decker was missing, and General Beckman would oversee a highly thorough search to figure out how and why he disappeared. Unofficially, Beckman would be using the missing persons search to scour his records to determine who had been assisting Decker on behalf of the Ring. Having Shaw captured and Decker killed eliminated two key sources of intel and recruitment for the Ring.

With a tinge of disappointment, Beckman pulled the folder on her desk over to read it through once more, as though the words on the pages might have changed since the last time she had opened the folder an hour earlier. The red and white striping indicated it was Eyes Only, with a list of just six people who were authorized to read it. An involuntary sigh and slight downturn to her mouth were the only visible signs of her disappointment.

The General had been surprised when she was notified that Walker had taken Shaw alive, especially in light of the fact that Shaw had, moments earlier, been threatening the life of the Intersect. While Beckman was ruthless in her efforts to keep the Intersect alive and secret, she had nothing on Graham's Wild Card Enforcer when it came to Bartowski's safety. The path of destruction the Enforcer would leave behind her would be both terrifying and awesome.

But the report wasn't about Sarah Walker. The picture just inside the cover showed Daniel Shaw trussed up in a straight-jacket, a maniacal gleam in his eyes, hair askew. She barely could reconcile the man in the picture to the man who had participated in numerous briefings with her on the Ring. Previously, he had been the model agent: intelligent, but emotionally detached-even stunted; nearly robotic in his approach to mission planning; dispassionate; the antithesis to Chuck Bartowski. As frustrating and vexing as briefings often were with Bartowski, the opposite had been true with Shaw. Watching paint dry was often more exciting than listening to his summarizations.

According to the shrink at the black site detention center deep in the forests of Poland, Shaw must have been supremely confident in his ability to pull off the attack. As soon as the tranquilizers had worn off (and Beckman made a mental note to check with Agent Walker on why so much tranquilizer had been used, and why she had been packing a tranq gun in the first place), Shaw had completely lost grip in a complete psychotic break, transforming into a raving lunatic during his every waking moment. The only coherent things he could say were "I would have gotten away with it if not for that meddling magnet" and, in a sing-song voice "Sarah, I'm coming for you!"

Now that Casey had had his fun dealing with Decker, maybe she should send him to Poland to see if he would be able to bring his powerful skills of persuasion to get Shaw to open up. Regardless of whether they ever obtained any actionable intel from Shaw, the fact that he and Decker, both previously unknown and unsuspected moles, were off the table for the Ring was a serious blow to the subversive organization. It would be difficult to impossible for them to get two more such highly placed assets within the intelligence community. Although that wasn't saying that the Ring wouldn't try.

* * *

Beckman had decided not to reveal to the powers that be that Chuck Bartowski was The Piranha. Given the level of penetration of Fulcrum and the Ring into the intelligence services, she was certain that word would get out that the Piranha was now assisting the NSA. Bartowski already had a big enough target on his back with the Intersect. As it was, only she, Col. Casey and Sarah Walker knew of Chuck's other alter ego.

Diane Beckman turned her attention to the next objective for Team Bartowski, the mission that she had used to convince Walker to leave Decker to Casey. Beckman swirled the cognac around the snifter, thinking briefly back to when Roan Montgomery had gotten her hooked on the drink as a way to decompress after a stressful day-which recently had been every day of the week. Once again, her team in Burbank had carried the day without so much much as a scratch. Once again, she had received congratulatory phone calls from 1600 as well as the Chair of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee and the Chair House Intelligence Oversight Committee. While a lot of spin control would be needed to explain away a paramilitary assault on a frozen yogurt shop in a retail shopping center near a major metropolis, the loss of life had been limited and was only among the Ring mercenaries. No one had seemed upset over the fact that Shaw had been sent to a black site detention center hidden deep in the forests of Poland.

The President and Chairs had already promised her a sizable allocation to rebuild the OO, and add to its defensive capabilities. Diane reflected on the unusual team that was winning her such accolades. Her man in the unit, John Casey had been a cold-school killer, ruthlessly effective at any mission he was assigned. After over two decades as an operator, he was nearing the end of his career in the field, and had been showing signs of burning out. At least, he had been burning out until he teamed up with Walker and Bartowski. If anything, he was more effective now.

And she knew that he enjoyed his off the books mission of eliminating the Ring mole, Clyde Decker. It still wasn't clear whether Decker or Shaw had been in charge of the attack. Decker was too high up the chain of command, knew too many skeletons in too many closets for him to be taken into custody with any expectation that the Ring wouldn't find and free him.

Taking a long sip of the cognac, letting the flavor build before swallowing it down, Beckman next turned her thoughts to Sarah Walker. Langston Graham's Wild Card Enforcer. Stunningly beautiful, highly intelligent, and-in her own way-she had been just as ruthless as John Casey. She had the reputation of always completing her missions, usually with a trail of dead bodies in her wake. After Graham's death, the Acting DCI over in Langley had been perfectly content to cede operational control of her over to Beckman.

If the rumors over at the CIA were to be believed, the new DCI didn't think anyone at headquarters would be able to control her. They feared what she could do, and even more so, they feared what she could reveal if she ever told Congress about the non-sanctioned missions she had undertaken over the years for Graham. Beyond that, they feared both what she was capable of doing, and her well known contempt for any sign of incompetence or corruption. As a result, Sarah Walker was on the CIA payroll, but she reported directly, and solely, to Beckman on the Intersect Project. The fools at the CIA probably thought Walker would see the long term assignment in Burbank as a punishment.

Then there was Chuck Bartowski. A genius who possessed possibly the only brain on the planet capable of fully utilizing the Intersect. Son of Orion, the architect of the Intersect. The Piranha. An unlikely hero, in the form of an innocent, naive, bumbling nerd who always seemed to step up when needed, to figure out a way to snatch victory out of the jaws of death, yet remained both humble and unwilling to follow the proper chain of command.

Given the penetration of the Ring into the corridors of power in the government, Beckman was keeping a tight reign on information about her Team, or why it alone was so successful in defeating Fulcrum and crippling the Ring. Personal glory aside, her team was vital to defending freedom for US citizens-and she would do anything and everything in her power to give them the protection they needed in order to carry on that fight.

Now, if Walker and Bartowski would only. If sending them off for several days of unsupervised house hunting while posing as a married couple followed by a couples whitewater rafting trip wasn't enough to seal the deal, she couldn't think of what would do it. But Roan was convinced that this would do the trick. There were plenty of times when she regretted just how knowledgeable Roan was at the art of seduction, but he was the best and he genuinely cared for these two. It was rather remarkable, especially given how for the longest time he had only cared about the next martini and companion for the evening. She was hoping that Roan would be right again, for the sake of Walker and Bartowski-although she was also secretly hoping to lose the bet she had with Roan over this little plot of intrigue and seduction.

Looking back, this was certainly not where she expected to be, both personally and professionally, when she had received that fateful phone call that Bryce Larkin had blown up the Intersect. What a long, strange trip it had been.

A/N2: I doubt many people were fooled by the ambiguity in who was driving the NSA Suburban. In the original draft, I had a single sentence where Beckman was dispatching Casey to eliminate Decker. But in one of the earliest reviews on this story, Baldcoder expressed a hope that Casey would get to use his minigun, "Betty". At the time, I had already written Casey's retreat into Castle, and wondered how I could make that happen. I think the resulting 10 to 12 paragraphs were the easiest writing I've ever done. The whole scene was there waiting to be written down. If only the rest of the story was that easy to write. The epilogue is in its finishing touches, but work is going to be all consuming for the next four to five days, so the final upload likely won't be until late in the week.


	12. Chapter 12

A/N: Well, we've reached the end of the road. No shootouts or bombs exploding here, just a warm fuzzy send off for Chuck and Sarah. I wanted to thank, one last time, all those who have reviewed and/or PM me about this story. Speaking of incredibly supportive reviewers, there's a phrase in the third paragraph that is taken straight from David Carner's brilliant Life Unexpected/Expected series, but with his express permission.

Epilogue: Chuck versus Barbie Part 2

"You know," Ellie said to Sarah as they sat on the riverbank watching Chuck and Devon pack up the raft, oars and cooler following their trip down the Class IV whitewater section of the river, "I've done a number of these type of trips with Devon-and on the rare occasion Chuck. But I've never had as much fun as on this trip. It was so great to have you here with me."

Sarah felt an immediate sense of satisfaction at hearing the compliment from Ellie. Ellie's remark made it sound as though Sarah had come along to accompany Ellie rather than Chuck. In a way, she had. Sarah had always admired how disarmingly genuine, intelligent and accomplished Ellie was. Sarah had both reveled (on a personal level) and regretted how quickly Ellie had welcomed Sarah into their family. Sarah hadn't realized how much she was missing such acceptance in her life, but felt self-contempt at the way she was forced to continue to repay Ellie's openness and caring with lies and deceit.

Sarah was also, truth be told, a little intimidated by Ellie. Ellie had not only accomplished so much in her own life, but also shaped the incredible man that Chuck Bartowski had become. Ellie was big sister, surrogate parent and confidant-at least until the Intersect had invaded Chuck's life, bringing with it the CIA's and NSA's best agents, not to mention lies, intrigue and far, far too frequent brushes with death and serious injury. Ellie would be madder than a baptized cat if she ever found out about Chuck disarming bombs, getting shot at, jumping out of a plane, getting pushed off a balcony while tied to a chair with Casey…

As with any conversation with Ellie, Sarah felt a swirl of emotions. There was the challenge of trying to intellectually match up to such a formidable woman. There was the sense of pride at not only being accepted, but embraced by the other woman in Chuck's life. Then there was the sense of guilt over her role in deceiving such an inherently good person, and the greater guilt at forcing an equally inherently good person in Chuck to do the same, against his personal nature.

"I have to ask you something," Ellie continued a moment later, shifting her intense focus from the men to Sarah. Sarah involuntarily stiffened momentarily. She began to mentally review the day's events to try to identify any possible slip ups that Sarah or Chuck may have made. Did she show off skills beyond what a frozen yogurt vendor would be expected to have? Had Ellie managed to spot any of the "just in case" weapons that Sarah had stashed on their trip in order to comply with the Agency's 30 foot rule? Were she and Chuck acting differently after the huge step their relationship had (repeatedly) taken during their safe house adventure?

Sarah and Chuck had rushed to pack their bags to head out with Awesome and Ellie shortly after returning from buying-and repeatedly breaking in-one of the new off the books safe houses. The house was tucked away on a backroad in Hollywood Hills, bordering up on Griffith Park, an underground passage would be built from the basement of the house into the park. Aside from being an ideal location close to Burbank in case of another attack on Castle or a threat to the apartment in Echo Park, the house was also postcard quality picturesque.

( _Three days earlier_ )

Sarah had known from the minute she saw it that it would be theirs. The only problem was that she had liked it so much that she wanted it to be _theirs_. But a safe house wouldn't be a safe house if she and Chuck were living in it year round. It wasn't a fancy mcmansion like some of the nearby houses owned by tv and movie stars. The natural growth trees around it provided privacy from nosy neighbors. The bungalow with wood walls and a cedar shingle roof seemed perfectly situated in the copse of trees that took up much of the property. The location on the side of the Santa Monica mountains also provided a gorgeous view over greater Los Angeles.

While the house didn't have the white picket fence and red door of her deeply buried childhood dream, it was comfortable and cozy. In other words, it was perfect for Sarah Walker, while also meeting the security requirements of Agent Walker. It helped that Chuck had loved it as well.

Chuck and Sarah had played deeply in love newlyweds at the realtor's office during the closing. Sarah had surprised Chuck after they signed the multitude of papers to buy the property, when she had rushed to the Porsche and driven to a storage facility instead of heading over to the house. Chuck had been further surprised by the moving van parked at the storage facility that Sarah had pulled up next to, quickly jumping behind the wheel of the truck. They had just as quickly driven off the the house.

Sarah was practically bouncing up and down with excitement when she put the truck in park in the driveway to the house. "Let's go look at our new house, Mr. Carmichael!" Chuck was starting to come to the realization that she was as excited about this private time as he was, as impossible as that sounded in his own head. She then jumped out of the cab and ran around to the back to roll up the back of the moving van. Chuck poked his head around to see it filled to the top with furniture and furnishings for the safe house that were all stored behind a huge king size bed, which would have to be taken out before anything else could be accessed.

"Don't you mean the NSA's new house, dear?" Chuck had said in a teasing voice as he helped Sarah move the bed frame into the master bedroom.

"Chuck," Sarah responded while turning all of her attention to the lanky man who she had decided was her future. "The NSA officially knows nothing about this house. They have no record of it, and-more importantly-no surveillance in it, on it or around it. Now, did you want to have a discussion about the deed to the house, or did you want to get this bed made so that Mr. and Mrs. Carmichael can properly christen their new home as a wildly in love newlywed couple would?"

In hindsight, she was glad that they had already put the bedframe down, as Chuck would have definitely dropped it on hearing that, and a trip to the emergency room was definitely not on the agenda for things Sarah wanted to do in their new home. "The box with the sheets and pillows is next. Then you can carry me over the threshold, and we can get in the bedroom and admire the view." She started laughing when she saw how fast Chuck could move when properly motivated.

Two hours later, she and Chuck were sampling the vegetarian pizza (no olives) from the nearest pizzeria. The boxes with food for the pantry, as well as every other box, was still in the back of the moving van. They had needed to refuel before trying to move the rest of the belongings into the safe house. They decided to enjoy the pizza while watching an incredible sunset, before they would begin the work of actually unloading the truck. The next morning they finally made it outside to actually begin unloading the rest of the van. _Who knew sunsets could be an aphrodisiac?_ Although he denied it, Sarah was pretty sure that Chuck was limping slightly. A grin spread across her face when she remembered which particular event likely caused the injury.

After unloading the rest of the boxes and furniture from the moving van, Sarah had given Chuck a massage on their bed. By the time the "massage" ended, they had showered and climbed into the van to drive back to get Sarah's Porsche before heading for dinner. Early on in the massage, they had agreed that there was no harm in waiting to move the boxes and furniture out of the foyer for the next time they visited the safe house.

The following morning, Sarah decided that waking up next to Chuck was only topped by waking up next to Chuck in a secluded, surveillance-free bungalow in the mountains. She was already looking forward to their upcoming trip to Cambria to buy a beachfront cabin-the second of their ultra-secret off the books safe houses. Having seen the photos online of how romantic that house was, Sarah was confident that the progress in their relationship would only continue to develop. Hopefully they would have good weather for viewing the sunset over the Pacific from the bedroom window. Then she could compare the romantic effect in the mountains compared to beachfront.

She wanted to talk to Chuck about suggesting to Beckman that the getaway weekends and couples rafting trip would signal to the outside world that their relationship was progressing quickly to the next level. She wanted to come right out and tell Chuck that they should move in together, but even thinking such a step was huge for her. It was easier to pretend that they needed to sell it to Beckman. But she was sure that after how much closer they were that she wouldn't be content any more with just the occasional sleepover-or a surveillance monitored sleepover.

She had to figure out how to convince Beckman to discontinue surveillance in the apartment once she moved in. There was no way she was allowing that part of their relationship to stagnate. Judging by the goofy grin that had been on Chuck's face, she was highly confident that he would be amenable to a more permanent sleeping arrangement. Especially a more permanent sleeping that was surveillance free.

( _Present day_ )

A blush graced Sarah's cheeks as she recalled their moving day celebrations. As Sarah did a mental review for any mistakes during the rafting trip, Ellie broke the silence, "What is up with Chuck and the pink Barbie life jacket?" As a laugh slid from Sarah's lips, Ellie continued, "I mean I always have encouraged Chuck to look his best, especially now that he's out and about with such a beautiful girlfriend," Ellie nudged Sarah with her shoulder. "And don't you worry, I'm already after him to get a haircut. It's getting a little on the long side, and will start making those funny animal shapes before you know it."

Sarah frowned at the last part. She happened to think that Chuck looked brilliant with long hair, and secretly loved to run her fingers through the curls at the end when they would cuddle up on the sofa for movie nights. This was especially true when the movie night was a "cult classic" which usually meant a lot more nerdy than Sarah would choose, so his curls provided a welcome distraction from the film.

 _What was the normal dating protocol when it came to deciding about a boyfriend's hairstyle? As his girlfriend, did she have veto rights over his appearance, or did that decision still rest with Ellie as his big sister/surrogate parent?_ Sarah's causal arrangement with Bryce had been much simpler, although infinitely less special. The only time either made any comment about the other's appearance was when it was based on how best to achieve mission parameters, not personal preference.

"But his hair aside," Sarah let out a relieved sigh as Ellie shifted the conversation, giving Sarah time to try to find out what "normal" was when it came to dictating a boyfriend's style, "what kind of a bet did my brother have to lose to wear a Barbie lifejacket in public?"

"Actually," Sarah responded, oblivious to the soft smile that appeared on her face as she looked to Chuck, "it was Chuck who bought the life jacket, and Chuck who decided that he should wear it today."

Ellie Bartowski was a highly observant individual. It was a necessary skill set in her given profession. Ellie was pretty confident that Sarah wasn't aware of the look of love that she would get when she would speak about Chuck during the couples weekend, letting her guard down. Back when Jill had been in the picture, Ellie had watched her carefully as well. Chuck had been infatuated with the beautiful, yet nerdy, woman. But Ellie hadn't thought it was real love-or maybe she just hoped that it wasn't love. But Jill had never let her guard down around Chuck, never truly embraced being part of a couple with him.

Although Ellie had been relieved when things had ended between Chuck and Jill, she hadn't been happy. Not when the end result was Chuck going through so much pain. But those dark days were well in the past now. It had taken far longer than she expected, but she knew that the experience with Jill, with all of the betrayal and pain, made this experience with Sarah so much more special. Ellie had to work hard to school her own features as she looked at the special woman who was so completely and utterly besotted with Ellie's little brother.

Ellie knew that Chuck Bartowski was a great guy. She also knew that Chuck himself didn't realize how great he was, but she saw that Sarah clearly did. She also knew, as she watched Chuck and Sarah share a secret smile, that someday in the not too distant future that great guy was going to marry the great girl seated on the ground beside Ellie.

Ellie felt a warm glow at that realization. For the longest time their family had only been her and Chuck. Then Devon Woodcomb had come along, not just sweeping her off of her feet, but going out of his way to befriend her nerdy baby brother. Despite Chuck's protestations, Ellie refused to think of Morgan Grimes as family— well, maybe a second cousin three times removed. But their family had grown, and it now included a woman that Ellie was already thinking of as her sister.

All they needed was a scrap of paper and a ceremony to make it official. Ellie knew without a doubt that Sarah was "it" for Chuck, and had been thrilled to realize that Chuck was "it" for Sarah as well. A little push here and there might help the two of them along the way to making things official. At least the two of them had finally stopped with the "it's complicated" crap. Of course it was complicated. Love always is.


End file.
